A Roiling Original

This game took me a week to get through, often using hints and cheats and occasionally a walkthrough.

This is a big game, and one of his earliest outside of mini-games like Fingertips. It's a sequel to Shuffling Around, his most popular game on IFDB and another anagram game.

This game follows the pattern of many of Andrew Schultz's games. It takes a wordplay theme (in this case, anagrams) and crams each room and object description with as many examples of that theme as possible (in this game, the opening rooms started out with fairly normal descriptions and only the later ones used a ton of anagrams). As in these other games, you navigate through various rooms encountering objects whose names fit into the theme, which you must then solve with wordplay. Typing the solved wordplay word changes the object in accordance with what you've typed. Many themes revolve around groups of people who are arrogant who must have their ego taken down a peg.

I think anagrams work well with this kind of gameplay, so I enjoyed the puzzles in this game more than usual. I do 'cheat' quite a bit, using online anagram solvers when stuck and so on. I used those the least when the areas had a 'theme' like conjunctions or adverbs.

Due to the proliferation in later text of anagrams for the sake of anagrams, some of the text became confusing. Here is an example piece of dialogue I had difficult understanding:

> "Opinions! That BS idea abides, biased!" Gunter glosses over Blue Frog Urbfogel, Bugler of Foulberg, and how he beat up monsters that came back anyway til he could beat her up? Talked to people who knew where hidden items like the horn-o-honor and gavel of Fogvale were. It was rigged! Now, with her dynamite, tidy name, oh, the soaring signora! Her vast harvest, her mystic chemistry-, her tact-chatter. Her lean elan's made Yorpwald go real galore--be aliver--a praised paradise--with her ReaLiv initiative for the Sunnier Unrisen Inner Us! From arsey years to so sane season! Had us voting her overnight the roving virgo then! Became a rowdy pal! Yorpwald was old, warpy, but now it's more wordy, pal! A Yapworld and Payworld! Oh, her good deeds!"

Because of that, I didn't try forming a mental model of the plot and instead just looked for obvious things to try making anagrams of, relying on the scanner first, then hints, then walkthrough if I got stuck.

Overall, I had a lot of fun. I did encounter a lot of bugs though. Both version 2 and 3 begin with a note from the author to himself to absolutely make sure to comment out beta testing commands and then lists them. At the very end of the game everything ends fast and it gives a yes/no questions, but answering YES ends up saying that there was a bug in the game or something didn't go right. There's a toaster that gives some buggy responses about xrays, as noted in the walkthrough (and which I experienced).

So, overall this game was great for me because I like trying to figure out anagrams, but I wouldn't recommend it in general except for other fans of anagrams, mostly due to the currently-existing bugs. I played it in my quest to play all Spring Thing games.

The protagonist has run afoul of his new citizens after taking the throne in Shuffling Around. There are (very minor) tweaks to the gameplay, but this is still largely an anagrammers delight as you transform words into other words.

The story is still quite thin, which may disappoint more character-driven players, but the mechanics and prose are fun and engaging.

My main complaint about the first game--the ambiguity between the extra hint & the regular hint, and the inability to swap them mid-game--is reconciled in this version. You have a device which can switch at will between cheat/no-cheat mode.

In general, I found this game harder and less forgiving than the first; I didn't ever have to view help files for the first game, but sometimes had to consult them to complete Roiling Original.

I'd highly recommend this game to fans of the original and of anagrams. Have fun!