Beef, Beans, Grief, Greens

It is nothing short of miraculous that Andrew Schultz has now made eight large, robust games centering on a very specific bit of wordplay that, to my knowledge, no one else has ever picked up on: transforming one two-word phrase to another, rhyming one by substituting a different initial phoneme (as in the b-to-g swap in the title). What’s more miraculous is that, though as always I struggled with it and there are some noticeable bugs, it might actually be my favorite of the bunch?

The gameplay here is much the same as previous installments: after a framing plot establishes stakes, you’re turned loose on a medium-sized world stuffed to the gills with the aforementioned rhyming pairs. The name of each location usually provides the starting blocks: typing in a successful rhyme for that might bring a new object into the scene, give you an inventory item, open up a path to a neighboring area, or just give you brownie points that allow you to skip a puzzle when you get stuck. Items and characters also usually can be poked at through the wordplay mechanic, allowing you to progress still further. There aren’t any traditional parser actions implemented besides movement, keeping the game focused on what it does best, and as per usual there are a large variety of hints, help functions, and other supports that let you know when you’re on the right track with a rhyme, list out common English sounds if you’re stuck for something else to try, and let you know when you’ve exhausted all the essential tasks in a particular area. This is a gameplay structure that can be quite challenging – after an hour, I find I’m muttering nonsense to myself as my brain leaks out my ears – but the games always go out of their way to be friendly to the player, the hitting on an unlikely rhyme that the game recognizes, and uses to spin a good joke, is delightful.

BBGG is a standout in the serious because of its the theme: this time out, you’re a gnome tasked with assembling the fixings for a feast, and you’ve got a checklist of foods and utensils guiding your progress. Beyond being pleasing in its own right, the theme also helps keep the various events that happen from feeling too unmoored from each other – in previous games in the series, it sometimes felt to me like the consequences of successful actions were essentially arbitrary, determined more by a syntactic validity than any other logic, but this time out there’s reason to go with most of the rhymes. The theme also helps guide your guessing in more productive directions: if you know you need to find some salad, it’s easier to jump to CHOOSE CHARD from LOSE LARD (not a real example, obviously that would be a terrible puzzle).

Unfortunately, in its current form BBGG is more than a little buggy. These games often see multiple updates and releases, so I’m confident they’ll be ironed out eventually, but for now, I found a couple of places where obvious placeholder or bug-testing text got spat out in response to what I thought was reasonable input, and the hint system seemed to get a bit confused in places. Most problematically, I also hit what I think is a progress-blocking bug that blocked a valid answer from being successfully processed, meaning that I couldn’t enter the endgame (Spoiler - click to show)(I couldn’t get the game to accept SPOON SPIED, even after I’d primed the GOON GUIDE with PRUNE PRIDE, which per the walkthrough should have been all that was required). Still, by that point I’d had a solid couple of hours of fun, and these aren’t the kinds of games where seeing the plot conclude is a major draw – much like a meal, the enjoyment is in the process of consuming it, rather than in getting to the end.

Chime Rhymes, Clue Through!

This is a rhyming game, and apparently not the first by Andrew Schultz but it was the first one I've played. I got stuck. A lot. I needed help. There is good help. There's a device in the game that is very helpful, and I thought that was implemented brilliantly.

Overall the theme of rhyming and feasting was an interesting one. This game is not terribly long, but it is long enough to feel like an accomplishment in solving. It is light hearted, and I laughed a bunch, especially at some of the responses to incorrect attempts. I am definitely eager to go back and check out some of the earlier games in this "series."

Not a bad way to enjoy an evening of puzzling word-play.

This is the 8th entry in Andrew Schultz’s Pro-Rhyme Row series, which is truly astonishing; how there can be so many paired rhymes in the english language blows my mind.

I really enjoyed this one for the first half or so. There is a feast of remembrance among the gnomes, and you are chosen to prepare food for it. Most of the rhymes in the game deal with food or appliances of some kind.

There is a map with a central location and four branches. Each branch has objects in it which you must find a rhyming pair for (or for the room itself).

Compared to other games in the series, this game made it easy to identify what the puzzles were and had some fun responses.

Some of the words made me laugh. My juvenile response to ‘tree troop’ made me laugh (although it wasn’t recognized) and I had the wrong answer at first to getting out of the ‘stuck state’.

I did run into some bugs though, especially with some repeating text. It was enough to hamper my experience. I did see a call for testers before the competition so it’s at least partially my fault for not responding, but fortunately the bugs seem not too bad to fix.