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Review
Note: This review was written during IFComp 2024, and originally posted in the authors' section of the intfiction forum on 9 Sep 2024.
This is a time-lapse game to be played over a number of days (don’t have to be successive), where you take on a job as an assistant in an apothecary’s shop, and aim to work a minimum number of shifts over the coming weeks. Along the way you are given light puzzles to solve, as well as a series of cryptic puzzles.
Initially I was puzzled by how time worked in the game. But found if I closed the browser tab and reloaded it on a later day it would move the game on, and let me play another session in the shop. There isn’t an advance time facility within the game interface eg a “go to next day” link you can click. Instead you need to open it afresh in your browser. Reloading an existing browser tab didn’t work for me.
Note apparently you are supposed to be able to play more than once a day, but I could never get this to work on my Mac.
The tasks that you are given by the shopkeeper are fairly easy spot tasks. Though some would be a problem for visually impaired people. The author hopes to fix that.
I was not expecting the cryptic crossword puzzles to pop up. I am not good at cryptic crossword puzzles! Over time you are given multiple pages of them to optionally solve. Helpfully the game links to a page of advice/tips/techniques/practice for solving such puzzles. And, surprisingly, I got quite adept at them! I did encounter a slight bug in Safari on my Mac, and in iOS browsers, but the author fixed this after my original review, which is great. Getting things working fully reliably on Safari (all versions) and iOS browsers can be extra complicated.
I was happy with the quasi ending I reached. Though I think I’d have preferred to play the game over a much shorter period. Repeated daily tasks like Wordle don’t generally appeal to me. And I felt constrained by the need to come back repeatedly over a long time. It also made it harder to remember plot elements from earlier days on returning. However the world is charming, and the tasks that you are given to do are satisfying.
The game has a built in mechanism for gifting to charity, where you can optionally gift some of your in-game earnings to several real world causes. A nice touch.
