Reviews by Wade Clarke

(This is an edited version of a review originally published in my blog during IFComp 2025.)

Not so Happy Easter 2025 (NSHE) is a humourous, light horror adventure written by Petr Kain in the Czech language for the ZX Spectrum. The author's translation of it to English debuted in IFComp 2025 and I found it to be compelling, well designed and a lot of fun.

I dig retro-platformed IF that is set in the present day, and NSHE offers the anachronistic delights of cell phones, Teslas and QR codes rendered via technology which predates their existence. It also has some contemporary design sensibilities such as an absence of random deaths or "walking dead" situations. As an Australian, the game was culturally interesting to me with its local slang, Czech currency and other European touches.

• Play Tip: In this engine, L is not short for LOOK but for LOAD, which will fastload a fastsaved game! To LOOK, either type LOOK in full, or R (for REDESCRIBE).

The blurb is a good one:

"You invented a simple adventure game for the kids in the town, where they had to solve simple puzzles and look for chocolate eggs. They solved nothing, they found nothing, and three of them got lost somewhere."

I like that second line conveying the mildly exasperated cynicism of the PC voice. The good thing is that that voice doesn't become overly cynical during play. 8-bit games of the day could be snarky at the expense of the game's narrative or atmosphere, and still can be if they emulate that tone, but I found NSHE to be sitting in a good spot. My own feeling of achievement in solving its seventy-five points worth of puzzles was not undermined by cheap one-liners. Those puzzles involve the PC's search for the missing kids with the goal of avoiding being drubbed by angry parents. There are a handful of F-bombs dropped and some described violence, but contextually there's not much of it and no gratuitousness.

The game starts in a town, and with this section being more open than what comes later, it's potentially a little more difficult, or at least less aimed. I found the key to success is to continue to make your rounds. The environment is mildly dynamic (e.g. there's a bus stop, and a bus that doesn't come immediately, and NPCs who come or go in response to events) but this is a game where repeat visits to locations and the retrying of actions over time can pay off. Once you've clocked this, the fact that the roster of locations isn't too big works for you, as does the limited verb set. The game gives a complete list of verbs if you ask for VOCAB, anything that can't be expressed with a more specific verb can be effected with USE A, or USE A ON B. There's lots of technical help, too, in the form of colour-coded feedback and the marking of interactive props with inverse text. Such features help prevent the wasting commands on things that aren't implemented.

The post-town adventure which takes place in spookier wilderness is where the game gets denser. This is well-performed classic adventure gaming with lots to do in a small number of locations, some back-and-forthing and the potential for new ideas and uses for such diverse items as an electric bike or a rubber duck to pop into the player's head. I finished with a score of 71/75, interpreting a few actions I performed as gaining bonus points, so there must have been some more that I missed. You can check your SCORE at any time en route.

Overall, Not so Happy Easter 2025 is a solid and solidly 8-bit adventure touching with humour on the tropes of modern life, still managing to exercise a bit of a PC voice and attitude through terse-leaning writing, and which does what it can technically to smooth play.