Ratings and Reviews by Dan Fabulich

This game does actually contain a hidden Nazi mode. (Apparently it took quite a few years to figure this out.) You can follow David Welbourn's walkthrough to find how to unlock it.

None of the reviews here explicitly mentioned that, so I wanted to make sure someone did.

The game is sort of a practical joke. FormerlyHiddenNaziMode.zip contains a deceptive PDF, Hidden Nazi Mode: Anatomy of a Failure, falsely claiming that the author has removed the Nazi stuff, and providing an incorrect command to activate Nazi mode. The zip also contains deceptive source code, which does not contain a hidden mode. (That source code is not the real source code used to build the zblorb file in the zip.)

You visit some locations, spin some text options to your preferred option, then "seal" your choices to commit to them. I think the order of locations and the spin text has effect on the poetry.

Everything was so surreal and metaphorical that I don't think I really got a message from this game. But the language was lovely enough that I could enjoy the feeling of the poetry washing over me, uncomprehended.

The game includes a lot of wise, well-regarded remarks on how to get through a breakup, and attempts to simulate the effect of a friend or therapist to help a you to feel seen and heard. It didn't do much for me, but it could help someone else.

I think the achievements were mostly distracting. They cluttered up the screen, forcing me to click on all of them to dismiss them and continue. There are so many, it felt like a parody of achievements, but, if it was a joke, I didn't find it funny, and if not, I'm not sure what the point of them was.

(One thing the game didn't consider: I'm still friends with the person I imagined for the purposes of this game.)

If you dally too long in this game, a seagull poops on your jacket, and you lose. Why?

Eventually, you walk. You move an average of 100 steps per walk. You start with around 7,000 steps in your score, and you have to get to 10,000 steps. After you walk five times, you have to do something besides walking (breathe or just wait) or you'll immediately lose.

You might find this game more efficient to play using periods to run multiple commands in one step: walk. walk. walk. walk. walk. breathe. Then use up arrow to do it again.

At the end, there's a trivial puzzle. (Spoiler - click to show)A red object on the beach, which you have to take in order to examine it. If you don't take it, you'll lose. When you go west, you meet a crying child. You win if you give the child the car, and you lose immediately if you leave without doing so.

What was the point of this story? The walking is boring. Is that the point? That exercise in old age is tedious? The puzzle is trivial, and the auto-lose feature of the game is frustrating. Is it the point that old age is pretty frustrating?

The game even has the cruelty to forbid undo, even when it'll kill you dead just for walking the wrong way at the ending, forcing you to redo the entire hike if you didn't think to save. Why??

Interactivity makes this short story more powerful.

Online, I've heard some commenters ask, mostly in bad faith, why Palestinians who had the option to move wouldn't simply move. These commenters seem not to be able to imagine what could be worth staying for. Playing the role of something worth staying for makes this point elegantly.

You can probably get to the end just guessing water/leaves until you reach your current season's goal, but there's also an interesting randomized optimization puzzle here, too. (I got lucky once and generated more than 30 lbs of olives.)

A bug report: At the end, it gives you a standard menu, "Would you like to RESTART, RESTORE a saved game, QUIT or UNDO the last command?" But if you try to undo, it says that "undo" is forbidden. But save/restore work, so I'm not sure it's meaningful to forbid undo. Might as well just allow undo, IMO, or block save/restore also, if you insist.

There's not a lot to this game as yet. I think it would have been a decent entry into IntroComp.

You click around, escape your bedroom, meet a mysterious NPC, and… that's the end of part 1, five minutes later.

Still, the dystopian setting is decently depicted. If this were an IntroComp entry, I would have voted for it to win. As an IFComp entry, well, there's just not enough here to get excited about.