Ratings and Reviews by Dan Fabulich

This game is pretty clever, and I enjoyed the majority of it. If you enjoyed Counterfeit Monkey, I think you'll enjoy this, too.

The game gives you a portable "reverser" gun, allowing you to reverse words. (You can do this in Counterfeit Monkey, too, but only in one particular location. Here, you can do it anywhere.)

The puzzles are fun and zany, as Counterfeit Monkey's puzzles often are.

I had three areas where I think the game would benefit from improvement.

First, this game is much more like Counterfeit Monkey than it is like Spider and Web, the other game that's it's listed as being "inspired by." I think alluding to Spider and Web is probably unwise, because it sets players up (it set me up) to expect a game like Spider and Web, and that's just not what this is.

I'll make some remarks about this here that are not spoilery for Retool Looter, but are mildly spoilery for Spider and Web. (Spoiler - click to show)Spider and Web is a game fundamentally about lies and lying, reconstructing what "really" happened. Also, Spider and Web has "The Puzzle," the puzzle right before the beginning of the final act. Retool Looter has nothing like that. It starts with a metal plate next to a door, much as Spider and Web does, but you can't pick the lock using your lockpick the way you do in Spider and Web; if anything, the allusions to Spider and Web are more of a funny "gotcha! this isn't Spider and Web!!" And once you get past the first door, the game is absolutely nothing at all like Spider and Web. I think Retool Looter would be better without the metal plate next to the starting door.

Second, the game doesn't allow you to unreverse the other agents, but it really doesn't make sense why. (Spoiler - click to show)For example, consider the limes. "You have no idea which of these limes is Emil, and you're forbidden from reversing anything to create new life. You'll need to take all of them with you so that each can be analyzed with equipment that can determine which has been reversed before." But… I do have equipment that can analyze which lime has been reversed. The reverser gun itself includes a little sensor light that will tell me if there's something in the room that's been reversed. There's no in-game reason I couldn't/shouldn't just pick up the limes one at a time until the sensor light goes out. Instead, the game just doesn't let you "get lime" when you have limes, even though it does support "get part" from a pile of parts. I suggest that Kay should just say that it's dangerous to unreverse people without specialized medical or mental-health treatment.

Third, the final puzzle really needs more hinting, and perhaps some bug fixing. We played it at the IF Meetup with half a dozen people actively banging our heads on it, and we eventually just gave up. I was only able to solve it by reading wolfbiter's gameplay tips. I wish the THINK command would have helped us more at that point. (Spoiler - click to show)Specifically, you really can't make progress on the puzzle unless you think of the word "sloop," but THINK stops short of mentioning that word. And it's still not clear to me what you do and don't actually have to do to begin piloting the sloop. Is it enough to just make a sloop? Do we have to make ports? (Why?) Do we have to make pools as well as ports?

Despite all this, I did really enjoy this game. But as it stands, it's almost one of the classics… but not quite.

I couldn't win this game at its easiest difficulty, following the "Beginner's Guide" walkthrough highlighted on the game's subreddit. https://old.reddit.com/r/RedAutumnSPD/comments/1hkkt39/beginners_guide_to_social_democracy_an/

"as long as you keep implementing WTB plan, nothing you do would screw your position ... Support otto braun for president. If you kept zentrum relations good enough you'll win in a landslide." Instead, my Zentrist allies refused to enact WTB, Hitler took power at 40% unemployment, and I lost badly.

I tell you that story so as to clarify what I mean when I say that this game is hard. I probably spent about two hours with this game, taking careful notes on the Library, and playing carefully following the walkthrough, and I didn't even come close to winning.

I fully believe that if I invested six or seven hours in the game, I could eventually figure out how to win once (maybe mostly by luck?) at the easiest difficulty, and that every minute of playing it would hurt. The feeling of winning would be a sense of relief that I could finally stop playing.

With clear parallels to the US, the message of this game is one of historically informed hopelessness. It *ought* to be easy to defeat the far right, just spend money on social welfare, but the centrists will never agree to that, and so the far right will ride into power with historical inevitability, and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it.

I respect that message, and I guess I'm glad that this game exists, but everything about it is unenjoyable. I feel like I wasted the time I spent trying to figure out how to win. Puzzle games need to have solutions that are surprising but inevitable in hindsight. This is a game where the solution is obvious, but where you're powerless to enact it.

Maybe I'll play it again if I find a better walkthrough, just to see what it's like to win, but I can't imagine ever enjoying this work of art.

And, that's the point of the game, I guess.