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Entre-d’œufs coquilles - An Eggcellent Preparation

by manonamora profile

Slice of life, children's
2023

Web Site

(based on 9 ratings)
2 reviews

About the Story

Clio, the pretty milkmaid, had been organising a special day for the past few weeks. This is to celebrate the anniversary of your first date. But you won't arrive empty handed.

An Eggcellent Preparation is the translation and remake of Entre-d’œufs coquilles, a French parser-choice hybrid, made in Adventuron. Entre-d’œufs coquilles was my first attempt at creating an Adventuron game.

The English version includes two extra puzzles, extra variations and actions, as well as a toggable tutorial/hint mode, a help page, and built-in walkthrough. Directions and interactible objects are also highlighted in the formatting.


Game Details


Awards

Entrant - La Sens Dessus Dessous

6th Place - Text Adventure Literacy Jam 2023

3rd Place, Best Puzzle-Focused Game; 52nd place (tie), Best in Show - The IF Short Games Showcase 2023

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Has sunny side, not scrambled, June 19, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: TALP 2023

My first reaction on seeing this was, oh no, I wanted to play the parser hybrid the author wrote for spring thing, and I just got lazy/behind! But then there was oh yes. They, presumably, had the confidence to build on their experience and use a standard parser programming language. It's really interesting to see someone move from Twine back to parser languages, as so often it's been the other way. And in the case of AEP, it works well!

Having recently played a game that wasn't really about just making a PBJ sandwich, well, cooking eggs seemed in the same vein. Given the author's previous works I figured it wouldn't be a straightforward "just make breakfast" affair, and I was right. Don't be fooled by the fried eggs on the cover, though. That is not how the eggs are prepared. Perhaps showing how they should be would be a spoiler.

And this isn't about preparing a fancy egg feast, either! Though I wondered if it would be, where the author switched from Thick Table Tavern and different types of alcohol to, well, a cooking scenario with all different manner of eggs.

AEP is about something more interesting. It involves proposing to someone in an unexpected and memorable way, and no, it's not throwing eggs at them. I enjoyed the intrigue here. There was an explanation of what you needed to do and why, and how it worked scientifically, and it wasn't too long, but my adventure-game-theorist side immediately said "Oh, I can see what sort of puzzles would come from this."

The plot is, in a nutshell: get eggs from the hen house, then prepare them (not the hens, silly.) This makes part of your marriage proposal, if you do things right. The puzzles are well thought out and lend themselves well to tutorials that don't spoil things. There are ways to mess things up, and the tutorial mode notes a few of them both before and after the fact. I'm being vague about what to do with the eggs, because I hadn't read you could do that, and I think playing AEP would generate more interest and surprise than reading me post it here. (You find out pretty quickly, in-game.)

As for the story, there's some amusing awkwardness and tension over how and when to propose and, yes, there are ways to do it wrong. A traditional way fails badly, and for good reason if you pay attention to things in your house. It's also possible to propose incredibly unromantically. So that's all quite funny.

AEP was clearly successful, to me. I felt like sort of like a bum for pointing ticky-tacky stuff out, and I was sort of glad the browser swallowed my transcript on itch.io. Because, well, it's the sort of thing that pops up in an author's first parser game, especially if they were just coming off writing an ambitious entry for Spring Thing. While what you do is inventive, getting through is itself not too esoteric with good hinting. The in-game walkthrough is fine, especially coupled with the tidy text map. It's a good size for a first parser game, and it does a good job of funneling the player into what they should do when presenting them with an interesting task, one where I thought "does that really work? That's neat." In fact, it's interesting enough, it's something I might try in real life.

Many text adventures/interactive fictions may remind me of books I want to read or even coding I want to try for my own games. Or they make me Google images of some far-away cities or look up terms. But actually try something new? That's rare. AEP did that.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A cute and complex game about preparing eggs, June 23, 2023
by MathBrush
Related reviews: 15-30 minutes

I played the English version of this game as part of the TALJ.

This is a fairly complex Adventuron game. Your girlfriend, a self-conscious milkmaid, is devastated that she forget eggs for her special salad, but you promise to bring some from your farm, in addition to another surprise.

The game is fairly large, with many rooms and also many items hidden within items within each room.

The writing is rustic and fun, with different animals you can interact with.

It's actually pretty hard; I found at least two different ways to completely fail without any warning given that I had failed, making it 'cruel' on Zarf's cruelty scale. But it's short enough that I was able to replay a couple of times to fix it.

This is one of the author's first full parser games. It's far more polished than most 'first' entries, but one kind of bug that slipped through is that many locations describe objects after you take them, like the alum.

Overall, it was one of the most rich and well-written TALJ games I played.

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Entre-d’œufs coquilles - An Eggcellent Preparation on IFDB

Recommended Lists

Entre-d’œufs coquilles - An Eggcellent Preparation appears in the following Recommended Lists:

Heli's favourite games by Heli N.
Inspired by manonamora's own idea, this list will contain my favourite games until now and will be updated in a regular basis.




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