Ratings and Reviews by Dan Fabulich
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This game credits no author or artist. According to my browser devtools, the AI chatbot conversation is happening with an actual live LLM (Grok 4.1, from xAI / Elon Musk), but I don't think that was necessary at all for the trivial interactions you have with the bot.
I believe the art is AI generated as well, but, with no credits, I can't prove it.
The game includes one actual choice, but there's no real difference in the three endings. If you crack down on the politician, does he go to jail? Does he make us suffer? It all ends in same scene on the couch in your apartment, which makes the choice feel less important.
This is a game where a significant portion of the game requires examining objects in the scenery that don't seem very notable at first.
For example, in one room, there's an axe shaft sitting in plain sight, but look doesn't mention it. Instead, you have to examine the (Spoiler - click to show)broken window frames in that room, and only then does look reveal the object you found. Almost all of the important inventory objects and clues are hidden in this way.
The problem is, most of the examinable objects are mundane, and their descriptions are kinda boring to read, sometimes even just the default Inform "You see nothing special" message.
> x wooden shelving unit
Each of the five shelves in this unit may once have overflowed with jars of preserved food, but now they hold nothing but a layer of dust.
If the game wants me to meticulously examine everything, I want those descriptions of everything to really shine, to make me want to keep examining everything, just to see what treats the author has tucked away in every examinable object.
Or, you know, just say "you see an old axe handle here" right when I walk in. That's fine, too!
(Spoiler - click to show)Particularly galling is that when I examine floorboards in the Front Hallway, "You see nothing special," but in the Back Hallway, there's a crucial clue.
It's also a game where you sometimes have to search, but there are only two or three things worth searching in the whole game. But if you're playing without hints, you still have to try searching everything, just to make sure, which is not fun, IMO.
Once you finish examining and searching everything, the puzzles are fun and fair, and the game is written well.
Good music, solid story.
I quite enjoyed this game. The writing is cute, and the puzzles are fun.
I have some spoilerific feedback for the author.
(Spoiler - click to show)I got stuck pretty hard on the oojamaflip puzzle. The game repeatedly pointed out with a parenthetical that the oojamaflip was relevant, but the encouraging words from Trala made it seem like a victorious status effect, rather than a puzzle to actively solve. And the solution, to use the gizmo, felt unclued. For most of the other inventory items, there's at least one other way to use it that gives you some clue about what it's for, but not the gizmo. The gizmo only works on the oojamaflip; only the gizmo does anything with the oojamaflip. Even after replaying, I have no clear idea how I was supposed to guess that. The gizmo and the oojamaflip seem to have nothing in particular in common; neither of them have any defined shape. I had to pray to get the hint to use the gizmo, which I then lawnmowered to solve the oojamaflip puzzle. I think the gizmo should do something somewhere else, to give me some kind of hint on what it could be good for, and/or one of the other items should do something with the oojamaflip, pointing me in the direction of the gizmo.
I also got stuck on the very last puzzle in the treasure room. I didn't realize that the "gold and jewels" were "gold" and "jewels," separably examinable. I'm not at all sure that this was a puzzle worth having. Making "treasure," "gold," and "jewels" synonymous would have let me just pick a treasure and move on.
More broadly, I think this game would benefit from bolding stuff that you can fly towards, and it would benefit from an HTML version that you could click on or tap on on mobile phones. (Dialog is great for that sort of thing!) For example, if the treasure description had said, "The platform is heaped with gold and jewels," I would have understood what to do.
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