The Two Seasons: Encounter With A Vampire

This is a pretty classic parser game about two dorky teens, Maddy and Matty, who discover one of their high school teachers is a vampire and set out to get rid of him using only items they can find around the school.

Encounter with a Vampire's setting is somewhat vague in both time and place: it's distinctly American-public-school-flavored, but the school has a chapel; the teens play Minecraft, but they don't appear to have phones and their first instinct upon needing to know a random science fact is to look it up in a book in the library (plus, it references the events of Buffy the Vampire Slayer as contemporary). But I don't think specificity and realism are high on Encounter with a Vampire's priority list; it just wants to be a silly action-comedy with some light puzzles.

I have to admit that I didn't really click with the humor style. It's heavily based on references and has a tendency to belabor a joke. For example, here's the Buffy bit:

Matty: (frowns, then smiles) I got an idea, why don't we ask your cousin to help us?
Maddy: Sheesh Matty, for the hundredth time Buffy is just a distant relation, like, my third cousin once removed, or something. Besides, she lives on the other side of the country!
Matty: Yeah, she's probably got her own battles to fight. sigh
Maddy: I think you've got a thing about her! rolls eyes
Matty: Uhh... not gonna lie, she sounds like she really slays, literally!
Maddy: (laughs) Yeah... but maybe I shouldn't have, like, told you those stories, it's not public knowledge you know!
Matty: Yeah yeah, my lips are sealed.

The joke there is basically just "hey, remember Buffy?" and it keeps going longer than it needs to to get that across. Although in cases where the humor is also humorous in-universe, it seems to be a deliberate point of characterization for Maddy and Matty that they tend to belabor a joke:

Matty: You know, I reckon he is totally wasted!
Maddy: Yeah, especially well-oiled!
Matty: Utterly rat-faced!
Maddy: Three sheets to the wind!

(Dear reader, this record has been abridged for your comfort, since this "banter" went on a long time, more or less until Maddy and Matty had exhausted all the euphemisms for being drunk they could think of, plus a few I'm pretty sure they just made up.)

Which is certainly something that dorky teens tend to do (I say, cringing internally at memories of my own teenage years).

The puzzles mostly flowed along nicely without being too challenging and the built-in hint system is robust and was helpful when I got stuck, although there are a couple things that made me go "okay, I was never gonna guess that on my own", namely the manner of getting the janitor to let go of the broom and using the [spoiler]shoelace[/spoiler] to get into the car (I still can't really picture how that one's supposed to work). However, the hints ensured that these things didn't hold me up for long, which is good, because I think this wants to be a pretty fast-paced game and benefits from keeping the momentum up.

I'm always very interested in action scenes in IF, which is quite possibly the worst medium to try to do an action scene in, so I was curious how the final confrontation with the vampire was going to go. There aren't really any puzzles at that point; you just type what seems like the obvious command and things happen in response. I think the way that it works is essentially the way Beat Witch wanted to work; in that case I didn't find it effective, but here the expected input was more intuitive for me so I didn't feel like I was hitting walls all the time and in fact felt like the scene had a really good rhythm. I do think it helps that it's just for the one scene (which isn't that long); it's probably hard to sustain the feeling of "I know exactly what to do, let's go" for very long without tipping over into "this is so hand-holdy that I wonder why you're even bothering to make me type things." But it was cool to see an author pull off the "parser action scene that really only wants you to type one specific thing at any given time" thing when I had previously been a little dubious about whether that was workable at all.

So I wasn't the perfect audience for this game; I'm sure there are people who will gel with its humor more than I did. But it's a confident and fairly well-polished moderately-sized game that did some interesting things that I appreciated.