Ratings and Reviews by deathbytroggles

An absolute delightful treasure romp in the vein of Hollywood Hijinx (only with loads more charm), Sugarlawn had me simultaneously hooked yet a tad frustrated.

I do love a logical treasure hunt and a game show might be the most realistic modern raison d'etre for taking everything not nailed down. And because it's a game show it's clear from the beginning that replays will yield better results; thus, I was prepared for obsessive map-making and note-taking which I thoroughly enjoyed. What frustrated me is the nature of optimization puzzles. For a while I enjoyed finding shortcuts to improve my score, but after a while the diminishing returns were more exhausting than invigorating. For example, one way to improve optimization throughout your treasure hunt is to pick up or drop multiple items at the same time, which to me is more of a trick of the parser than a realistic strategy. So after four or five meticulous runs through the game I felt sated, despite several puzzles not yet being solved, because I knew even if I solved them I would never have the patience for peak optimization.

Despite this I wholeheartedly recommend playing it at least once, if for nothing but the fourth-wall breaking whimsy. It's always clear while playing that you're on camera (this fact is used for puzzle-design as well), and it's frequently played for laughs. If you regret a decision and type undo, a voice calls, "All right, we’ll just record over the last thing you did.” And I've always had a soft spot for New Orleans culture and history, and so I got to bathe in that to my heart's content.

I have to admit I was unfamiliar with this aspect of Scottish folklore and I am glad I was able to learn about it through interactive fiction. The author here has a solid grasp of the prose and was able to immerse me in the fate of the horse and the child. Though while I found this to be quite interesting, that’s the strongest emotion I felt while playing. There wasn’t enough knowledge of the characters for much pathos, and the branches of each choice were so narrow they didn’t feel like choices until the very end.

A potentially decent game for beginners as the story and settings are simple and charming and puzzles are straightforward. Unfortunately, the prose is isn’t as elegant as it could be and there’s a few missteps that break the storytelling. The first comes right at the beginning. To wit:

“...your car is to the south where a straight road with no traffic passes the store in an east-west direction…”

>x car
You can’t see any such thing.

Yes, it was simple enough to go south and then examine my car, but I started out annoyed and gave up on anything being too detailed.

The most glaring issue comes in the ending, when you read a letter from Old Jim, where it begins with “Hi there (your name).” Either this was a bizarre design choice or the author forgot to prompt the player to ever enter their name while playing.

I was looking forward to this game, hoping to learn something about one of the all-time great IF authors. Unfortunately, the only thing that I learned was that he got married and he invited some friends. I learned a bit about the author, including his aversion to Uber, but I would have rather just a read a story about his trip than playing this game. Perhaps it was the fairly banal descriptions of people and places. Perhaps it was the complete lack of puzzles while being force fed commands to type to advance the story. Perhaps it was all the spelling mistakes. But the entire exercise felt like a chore.

From the start it is obvious this is going to be a fairly standard, beginner IF. Room descriptions are sparse, what to do is almost always obvious. Still, I was hoping that it would be a fun ride. Unfortunately, there was not nearly enough beta-testing. Spelling and grammar mistakes abound. At one point you’re told if you have the right tool you can pry some nails and yet the game doesn’t understand the verb "pry." There are several other unimplemented synonyms. The game’s worst sin, however, is that this is supposed to be suspenseful yet you are frequently told how you should be feeling (e.g. “you are on edge”). As always, show, don’t tell.

This has the skeleton of a well-designed entry into the horror genre. The backstory is interesting and several of the puzzles are fun. But first it needs a rewrite.

A beautiful Twine game by veteran Astrid Dalmady, this nevertheless left me a bit cold. It’s funny how an art exhibition is practically an IF trope, and it was ripe for the Twine treatment. And while the use of medium is top notch, my feelings are mixed on the story. The prose is certainly evocative, though a bit melodramatic for my tastes and to the point where I find myself not sympathizing with our protagonist.

I quite enjoyed the first ending I came across where (Spoiler - click to show)Leonara becomes the artist, enough to try the game again. However, each ending I came across was less satisfying and made the story feel broken (I mean, really, (Spoiler - click to show)killing my mom is an option?). I enjoy multiple endings in a comedy or adventure game; but in a serious dramatic piece, I say tell the story you want to tell. Being able to change the PC’s morals on a whim feels gross when the stakes are this high.

I’m an old fuddy duddy for sure so I definitely wasn’t digging a game that entails almost entirely watching users chat on-line using text-speak, even if the setting of on-line poetry forums was intriguing. The game has an odd way of scoring: the poetry forum ranks you based on your character’s ability to write poetry; however, you the player are scored on how you treat others in the forum. I would have loved to have been given a chance to create some poetry of my own, but I was relegated to choosing my demeanor and letting the talking heads play it out. For the most part you don’t actually see any poetry, just usernames talking about hypothetical poetry they enjoyed writing together.

That said, this game is pretty fun technically as it uses various screen prompts to check for viruses and allow you to download files. And the true ending (the one I received on my first playthrough) was a neat, sentimental twist. However, I had little desire to find all nine endings, primarily because I found a game crashing bug on my third playthrough which didn’t motivate me to keep clicking on all the possibilities.

I will say that the conversation tree game is much better suited for Twine than your standard parser, as all you have to do is click rather than type “1” or “2” or whatever a hundred times. But I’ve never really cared for the genre, and I’m not sure what this story about relationships is getting at. There’s from what I can tell just a few endings, none of them terribly enlightening. The unique thing about this game is that the image on the screen is the NPC’s eyes and they shift in tone depending on how you respond, but the game is so short and so devoid of substance that there’s not much impact.

Being trapped in a vortex with evil cheese is one of those settings that pretty much only works in IF and I give the author props for the silly idea. Unfortunately the game is one rather tedious long puzzle that combines all of the worst types of short puzzles together, to wit: a riddle; waiting around until something happens; and of course combining abstract concepts of the on-line world with hastily made explosives(!).

I also wish the angry cheese had more variety; it mocks everything you do, but in exactly the same way at every moment. I only played for about fifteen minutes before resorting to the walkthrough so I could finish.

The endgame was cute, though I was left feeling hungry.

If you enjoyed Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail Of It--specifically the Shopping Bizarre--then Shuffling Around is an absolute must play.

I've always been fairly good at anagramming but found it mostly dull. But Schultz did just such an impressive job at turning it into a funny, engaging game with clever puzzles and endearing characters. And even if you're not good at anagramming, there are an unbelievable amount of gadgets you can use to give yourself different types of hints depending on your weaknesses that allow you to play at the exact pace you want. On top of that, if you get truly stuck you can just ask the game for more direct hints if you want to avoid going to an anagram solver on-line.

Like the Shopping Bizarre in Nord & Bert, you must often solve random anagrams lying around to get objects for your inventory to use on puzzles later. And while some of the puzzles are really straightforward (e.g. anagramming a bunch of items in a kitchen to make yourself some food), there are some rather genius multi-step puzzles, my favorite being the one to defeat the archenemy in the sortie.

But beyond just the puzzles, Schultz spent on what I can only imagine was an ungodly amount of time writing copious descriptions of rooms and objects that use clever anagrams for no other reason than to show off, and it was wonderful. Admittedly some of the anagrams are forced and make the writing a bit stilted in places, but in this world it was welcome.

There's not much of a story and it's mostly a disjointed puzzlefest, but considering each anagram I solved was like pushing a dopamine button, I was glad to be a rat in this maze.