Raspberry Jam

While most TALP games focus on the parser, Raspberry Jam allows hyperlinks to get around its homebrew engine. That makes it an oddity in TALP right away. By the end, I wound up clicking keyword links much more than I used the parser, but the "click one text object, then another" fits the word/word aesthetic TALP requires and brings up the interesting question: might NOUN NOUN be a legitimate way to skip guess-the-verb?

It's quicker here, at least once you get the hang of things. Once I did, I realized the game was good work, despite its flaws. It's worth a play-through, as it's not very big. Overall, I saw what the author was doing, even if it was a bit hidden. But it never got beyond that for me. Reflecting on this game, it seemed like whatever praise I had was qualified with a "but," but on the other hand, so was criticism. So this review feels clinical, but it's the best way I know to say "yes, there will be obstacles, but this game's worth playing."

First, the plot: you're a young boy, living with your grandmother on a small farm. You're given tasks. The initial puzzle, bringing water from the well, is a good one to establish the tutorial part of the TALP jam. Then you need to go further in the woods to find more things Grandma asks from you. Nothing terribly dramatic or death-defying, so it's a good fit with the jam.

And as for the word "jam:" it's easy for me to picture a native English speaker thinking jam-the-food and jam-the-event were too alike to connect, and thus a game featuring jam would be too on-the-nose, right? But non-native speakers see things with new eyes we can't, so they had no such self-censorship, and I'm glad of that. The games are supposed to be child-friendly, and this one was. One puzzle obliquely concerns safety with sharp objects, something I didn't really learn until Boy Scouts, and it was certainly nicer than the yelling I remembered about what you'd better not do. (Yelling was not necessary.) I'm glad it was about more than just jam.

But on the other hand, the reason I bring up the author's not a native English speaker is because they do many logical-but-wrong things with English grammar (e.g. "an bucket"). This, though, gets a pass. Creating a custom engine is tricky, and they got that right (though there is a learning curve) and there's never any question what they meant. The writing overall has purpose and direction and doesn't deluge us, and perhaps it can fit in with the idea of a kid from a far-off land telling us about their day while maybe being a bit too excited and slipping up with a word here and there. There's more than enough substance and organization that we can allow RJ these slips and not feel like a condescending adult patting its hand. I still sometimes cringe when I say or think "Well, it's brave of them to even write in their second language," because there are so many ways to say it, but it's just one more variable to juggle when trying to program, and it can't be ignored.

That said, it would be nice to have some bumpers once we were done with a quest. This is difficult as there are some moving parts: you're able to return an axe to its storage place before you use it, and if you do so, you score five points, which are retracted once you take it down. Then once you've used the axe and stored it, you can take it down. Details like that. They aren't critical, but it feels like the author put in a good effort on the very important stuff and didn't quite have time to polish things. It's just stuff I feel they wouldn't have missed without the additional mental energy needed to write in a second language. There's also a nice bit of technical work where the author lets you scroll up and down in a room's description, but when I tried to make the screen bigger so all the text would fit, the text stretched.

I'm also up in the air about the ending. A few clues existed, but I left in disbelief for a bit. I wound up missing on the final five points, which are not on the task list. It's something that, emotionally, the story would be wrong to clue directly, since such an action shouldn't be forced. However, once someone else hinted it, I saw it immediately and realized I'd not been paying full attention, but I didn't really feel motivated to go back. So it was more "Oh, that makes sense!" than the emotional connection the author looked for.

Still, RJ seems like a successful experiment, technically, but the author may not have hit their creative stride. Yet. There's a lot to be sorted out, but RJ doesn't need saving, and at heart it's a small nostalgic game that's fun to work through and brings back a few memories. One can't argue the author is technically or creatively clueless. It's just a bit obvious where they miss the mark, and once you're able to accept a few shortcomings, it's a pleasant experience, and TALP is clearly the better for it.