Ratings and Reviews by Dan Fabulich
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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.
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??
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