Reviews by Dan Fabulich

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.

Last time, I gave Uninteractive Fiction 4 stars. It was a joke game, funny, worth the ten seconds it took to play.

Jokes have to be surprising but inevitable in hindsight to be funny. Last time, UF pleasantly surprised me (especially the sound track).

This time, it wasn't surprising. I don't think it'll be funny at all if there's a next time.

You and an appointed "dark-skinned" English crew member are appointed to explore the Island of Rhynin. (Spoiler - click to show)At the end, you get to decide whether to kill him or not.

It's pretty easy to get to the ending. Despite the blurb's claim, none of the choices I made seemed to have any effect on the plot. My choices just increased/decreased my stats, which had no effect on the game.

And then, the ending, which is where the colonialism really kicks in.

What was the point of this story? None of my earlier choices had any effect. The ending choice means nothing to me. The plot is nothing but a regurgitation of colonialist propaganda.

I think this would be a two-star game if it weren't for the dehumanizing colonialism. Instead, I'm giving it one star.

As the description explains, this is a game about a growing addiction to asking AI for assistance. The horror begins as you (Spoiler - click to show)try to delete the AI, but it refuses to allow you to delete it.

But, just as soon as that conflict arises, the game ends. It left me wanting more, but, in a bad way.

The #1 guideline on IFComp's Guidelines for IFComp authors is to playtest your game and credit your testers. This game credits no testers; it seems pretty clear that it didn't have any.

Here's what would have been my beta feedback:

• The space is divided up into four locations, "middle of the bed," "Top of bed," "Bottom of the bed" and "out of the bed". But the game provides approximately no affordances to discover how to get there, nothing except the "HELP" command that suggests "There are four directions, move with the GO (north, south, east or west) command."

  Instead, I suggest describing location exits in every room description. "The top of the bed is south. The bottom of the bed is north. You can get out of the bed to the east."

• In "middle of the bed," it says "You can see a basket here." By convention, "here" implies that the basket is in the current location with you, in the middle of the bed. But if you try to "get basket" from "middle of the bed," it says, "You can’t possibly reach that basket from the middle of the bed." Because the basket isn't here, it's in the "out of the bed" location to the east.

  Ideally you'd write some code that would tell the player where the basket and/or baby is, wherever they may be. "The baby is in the basket outside the bed to the east." "The baby is at the top of the bed. The basket is at the bottom of the bed."

  Barring that, you could just not mention the basket at all in the "middle of the bed." Inform will describe it automatically when the player gets out of the bed.

• (Spoiler - click to show)`READ BOOK` didn't make it clear enough that I was reading the book silently, that I wasn't reading the book _aloud_. The winning move is to `READ BOOK TO BABY`, which I couldn't figure out on my own; I had to decompile the game with mrifk https://github.com/wertercatt/mrifk/ to figure it out.
• The room description for "Top of the bed" says, "You look at your phone, but no new messages. You take a sip of water from your glass." But if you pick up your phone and water and drop them elsewhere, it still says that. Instead, I think it should say that your "nightstand" is here. It should tell you that there are no new messages if you look at your phone, wherever you are.
• DRINK WATER says "there's nothing suitable to drink here," even if you're at the top of the bed with the water.
• "out of the bed" says "An empty basket lies on the floor next to your bed." But, by default, the baby is in the basket, so that's not true.
• (Spoiler - click to show)`READ BOOK TO BABY` prints out a parenthetical "(the end)", but instead it should end the game saying "The End."
• FEED BABY assumes you mean "(to yourself)" and says "You can't feed the baby to yourself. That is obviously not what I meant! Instead, it should print a message that it's not feeding time yet.
• All of the plot comes across in the last move, as you (Spoiler - click to show)READ BOOK TO BABY. But I think it would make sense to move some of that information to any of the various COMFORT BABY, KISS BABY, etc. commands so it's not such a huge wall of text at the end.

The game's premise is charming. The game is pretty short, and there are only a few choices in it. I think I would have enjoyed more choices, especially near the end game, when (Spoiler - click to show)interacting with the unfrozen human.

(It also strains belief that this alien would know the difference between Cash Assistance and SNAP, which is to say that the alien knows what "cash" is, but doesn't know anything about why these programs are administered so poorly. Maybe give me a choice about why I think the HRA is run like this?)

The game is a parody of a personality test that a corporation would administer to potential employees. They're widely reviled, and so it's a pretty easy target. In addition, the author has imagined the test to be administered by AI, another easy target.

But, as a result, the game never gets all that funny. It starts off with a surreal question, and remains surreal and random throughout. In my opinion, to get to be actually funny, you have to be surprising, but inevitable in hindsight. Starting surreal and staying surreal doesn't give the game enough room to make the player expect something, so I could never really be surprised by anything.

EDIT: Replayed today at the SF Bay Area IF Meetup and we discovered the (Spoiler - click to show)dating simulator endings. Now that's what I call surprising but inevitable in hindsight. I've changed my review from 3 stars to 4.

To get to those endings: (Spoiler - click to show)Play along with the survey enough to receive a job offer, then choose "Not Awesome" and refuse to work there. When asked why, say that the survey isn't even really an AI.

I think I would have given this game 5 stars if all of the endings had been that good.

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.