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Number of Ratings: 15
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1-15 of 15 - Beable, October 15, 2022
- Kinetic Mouse Car, August 4, 2022
- tekket (Česká Lípa, Czech Republic), April 21, 2022
- thedigitaldiarist (Canada), January 10, 2022
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1 people found the following review helpful:
Better than its first impression, December 13, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
This Won’t Make You Happy gives a first impression that seems like it’s going to live up to its title: the design is close enough to default Twine to look rough, and the confrontational narrative voice is way too in love with the cleverness of a meta premise that’s actually pretty played out (like, have you ever thought about whether hoovering up shiny objects might have some metaphorical resonance with the pursuit of happiness and mental health under late capitalism? If so, approximately six billion indie platformers would like to have a word). Happily, the game pulls the good kind of bait and switch, and while its short length limits the impact it can have, This Won’t Make You Happy actually did bring a smile to my face. If you haven’t played it yet, definitely don’t be put off by the prickly presentation – it’s worth the additional five minutes to see where it’s going.
If you have, here are some final spoilery thoughts: (Spoiler - click to show)the crux of the game is clearly the moment where, after provoking a fight through its blatant unfairness, the narrator admits that it’s been a rough year all around, and shifts gears to provide some reflection and self-care – enforced through timed text that’s actually a good idea, for once! I was confused by the blurb’s characterization of this as a sort of funny, sort of sentimental game, but after finishing it, that totally makes sense.
Highlight: Despite the initially-blah design, there are actually a bunch of neat visual effects as the text transitions from one passage to the next.
Lowlight: In the first chunk of the game, I wound up seeing the narrator make the same dumb “the object seems to say X, but of course because it’s just an object and I am pretending to not understand how metaphors work despite just having deployed one, that doesn’t make sense!” joke like three distinct times in five minutes.
How I failed the author: I played this one-handed on my phone while Henry napped on my shoulder, and again, this wound up being a secret success: if there is a jewel of happiness more efficacious than a sleeping baby, I’ve yet to find it.
- Jacob MacDonald, November 16, 2021
- Pegbiter (Malmö, Sweden), November 15, 2021
- Karl Ove Hufthammer (Bergen, Norway), November 15, 2021
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1 people found the following review helpful:
Fourth-wall-breaking humor, November 9, 2021This game has a self-consciousness of game tropes and fourth-wall-breaking that I probably would have found very deep fifteen years ago. Now, I feel like the game was too short to explore the existential problems of collecting things and killing things in platformer-type games. I also had the game-ending bug with the cyan type.
I did like the various effects the writer used with the type, like making it different colors and shaking or blurring it. It made me want to try something like that in my own games.
- BrettW (Canberra, Australia), November 4, 2021
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1 people found the following review helpful:
Why won't I be happy?, October 31, 2021If I didn't feel happiness, then why was I smiling? This is a short, irreverent game whose humor I mostly appreciated. For some reason, I did not write a review the first time I played it, and couldn't remember how it ended. Playing again on Chrome, I got stuck on some pages with no choices available. Sometimes backing up worked, a couple times refreshing did, but eventually I couldn't progress any more. Then, while playing on the phone, I got stuck in a loop trying to pick up a gem of happiness. Even more upsetting, on both devices I was unable to access the "USER ANGER LACERATION" song. I am forced to rate this as incomplete. I'm going to be traveling out of country for a couple weeks, but when I return, we can discuss our options for completion. You have until the end of next semester.
2 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
A quirky Twine game about exploring a fantasy-based cave, October 24, 2021In this game you explore a small cave with different fantasy creatures and gems and such in it.
This game is part of a small genre of games best described as 'quirky twine game based in a cave/dungeon that riffs on the silly parts of fantasy games but also has feels and is generally a simple branching structure with little state tracking'.
Other entries in the genre include Just Get the Treasure v0.9.1, Girth Loinhammer and the Quest for the Unsee Elixir (a more complex example), TOMBs of Reschette, The Cave (a less humorous example), The Thing About Dungeons, etc.
This game is definitely on the zanier end. My son first got into Twine with games like this when he was 5, like Escape from the Crazy Place, because it's fun to do silly things like (in this cave) refusing to enter the cave from the get go. For me, as an adult, I still think it can be fun at times.
For some reason one of the passages didn't work at all for me on PC chrome, but it did when I loaded it up in the Twinery app (the one all in cyan that's on time delays).
Overall, I think that this game has some entertainment value, but I think it didn't offer very much new.
- OverThinking, October 21, 2021
- Ann Hugo (Canada), October 4, 2021
- Zape, October 4, 2021
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