Unseelie

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/22/26, 4/24/26, 4/28/26
Playtime: 1.75 hrs over four sessions, won

Am I capable of opening a review of a TADS work without proclaiming my unwavering fealty to that authoring system? My track record might suggest ‘not at all’ but I’m going to try it here. Except that first sentence kind of… D’OH!

Unseelie really goes out of its way to bias you under-appreciate it. The ABOUT screen lays out its genesis, not as a passion project, but as an undercooked assignment that got out of control. Then a half-hearted “might as well” ST submission, with self-confessed shortfall in aspirations. On the one hand, little risk of unachievable expectations. On the other, what a wild choice to SO prime the player with reservations. It’s already in the back garden, we KNOW there are caveats! Sure, points for transparency, but for me the invitation to dismiss it was so prominent it kind of colored my play of it.

That low-expectation level setting does immunize it from disappointment, but it also partially closes our mind to its charms. Every typo and gameplay glitch that follows can’t help but be seen through the lens of what it could have been. The narrative is very shallow - the protag is bumped into an otherwordly portal by dimensional travelers, then left to navigate a quasi-liminal set of tunnels. This is not a ding on the work, it harkens to very early parser traditions where the wandering and puzzle solving was the point. It does though, put a premium on the construction of those puzzles.

Here, I think, is where the undercooked nature of it works against the player. It has very clear “obstacle-circumvention” gameplay. A prisoner that must be freed. A faucet that must be turned on. A creature that must be distracted. The puzzles are a mix of classic “find key” and some more clever discoverable mushroom capabilities. I identified two things that ultimately prevented me from fully embracing the work.

The first was the absence of soft cues. This seems a deliberate design choice, putting a premium on player experimentation and exploration. There is nothing inherently wrong with this choice, in fact the biggest charges I got from the game came from connecting mushroom effects to puzzle solutions. The question this inevitably raises though is “What happens when player runs out of ideas?” Historically Hints or Walkthrough provide the goose necessary to keep going. Or progressive cuing text. Absent all that, players will sooner or later run into a wall. And here is where the expectation setting undermines things. By so thoroughly disarming us, we don’t really have a narrative hook to keep driving us past blockages, nor a confidence that the game itself is not blocking us. This was compounded by the inclusion of multiple locked doors, a (Spoiler - click to show)card reader, and an (Spoiler - click to show)unknown nest object that ended up being red herrings. Absent soft cues, they represented potential puzzles a player might spend an INORDINATE amount of time spinning on. For me, this added up to four separate game sessions of trial and error with fits and starts in progress, each time with decreasing enthusiasm. It is unclear, if this had not been a TADS work, if I would have bothered.

The second barrier to full embrasure is fear of puzzle design I am calling “steps for steps sake.” Some puzzles are rendered as multi-step. Freeing the prisoner requires finding an item to free them, only to be told “no you need more.” Same for the faucet with multiple valves. These are a tried and true tradition of parsers, no doubt, but the construction of multi-step puzzles is a delicate thing. The way they SHOULD work is a tiny shot of endorphins when a step is completed, egging the player further and providing some reward for the work to date. When the ‘reward’ is a repeated “NOPE, you have uncovered more blockage” that crucial shot of motivation is leached away, and you start to lose faith that further progress will not be met with MORE blockage. Yes, for sure there is an ultimate success waiting for you, but no real sense how far off that is, and how many blocks the game will throw in your path before you get there. These represent an increasing ‘enjoyment debt’ that threaten to overwhelm the stuck player, particularly if this is a common outcome of several concurrent, in-flight puzzles. I am glad to report that the chain of blockages is in fact quite shallow, and all of these puzzles DO reward tenacity! It turns out it was only a FEAR of steps-bloat, not actual bloat! It’s just, given the warnings we were given (particularly since I was solving things in parallel), not to mention distracting red herrings, a good deal of the playtime was under a shadow of dread. Then, because the puzzle solutions transition to game end so unexpectedly and abruptly (when red herrings were implying further gameplay), I never really had a chance to ENJOY the sense of accomplishment the puzzles DID provide!

Per the portentous ABOUT warnings, there are quite a few implementation issues as well - stray words and messages polluting object descriptions; a closed box reporting open; LOTS of missing nouns; iffy punctuation; some spelling typos; and most egregiously mushroom disambiguation and repetition issues. It seems overwhelming when put in a list like that, but honestly? Not as intrusive as a cold list would suggest.

So yes, despite ALL of that whinging, there is a lot more going on here than the ABOUT disclaimers suggest. The setting is solidly rendered with a consistent “Implementation Horizon,” effectively painted by tight, efficient writing. It leverages some more advanced TADS capabilities like Dispensers and AccompanyingState in its structure. The NPC is more deeply implemented than you would think, including acting as a soft HINTer if asked the right questions. I’m not sure I could engineer this tight an experience in only two-ish weeks. If the Back Garden is not custom made for this kind of work I don’t know what it IS for. It is a fully realized collection of TADS puzzles, ultimately a bit more mature than its disclaimers would have you believe, stocked with traditional game play and some nice mushroom-based curve balls.

That ABOUT disclaimer set a trap of underestimation I just barrelled into. Thanks to its clever construction, I did eventually claw my way out and enjoy it. I just wish I hadn’t spent so much time ensnared in misconception! Even partially-realized TADS works are still TADS!

Spaceship: Hermes
Vibe: Part-time Parser
Polish: Rough (despite head faking Distressed)
Gimme the Wheel! : Were this my project it would OF COURSE be TADS. The most obvious things to address gameplay-wise would be either HINTS or WALKTHROUGH, missing nouns, or typo/grammar/stray message fixing. But I think my code wonkery would push my first priority in a different direction. There were awkward disambiguations throughout the work, most especially once you realize you can pick as many mushrooms as you want. I think I would plumb TADS’ isEquivalent and CollectiveGroup capabilities to tame that field as a first priority. Honestly though? Softening the ABOUT disclaimers would have the biggest impact on my enjoyment!

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

This is an unfinished TADS game with some good content and promise.

You get isekai'd by two weirdos into a purple portal. The world you enter has lots of pipes and knobs and rust (feels kind of mystlike) as well as a critter (doesn't feel Mystlike).

The cool thing about the game is all the mushrooms (which you can take multiple chunks of for each fungus). Through experimentation and consultation you can determine the unique properties of each, which are quite complex. The game models liquids, multiple objects, movable 'door'-like objects, and NPCs.

A more full version would definitely benefit from hints and from a general pass of bugfixes and better implementation. I had to read two people's transcripts to see how to progress. Overall though I had a good time, it feels like fun interaction.

This is unavoidably going to sound like damning with faint praise, but Unseelie is really good for an untested parser game made in a week. Like, there is a reason this is not how anyone writes parser games these days, outside of speed IF and other such contexts where having even a minimally-playable game at the end counts as an achievement – beyond the fact that it’s unfinished, with a plot that ends just when things are starting to get interesting and a solid quarter of game’s puzzle paraphernalia going unused, there are bumps in the road a-plenty, from underclueing to a frustratingly-invisible disambiguation issue that almost prevented me from getting through the final set of challenges. But! While presenting a reasonably old-school puzzle-dungeon, the design is generally welcoming and engaging, with fairly robust implementation, a couple of distinctive setting elements living up proceedings, and unpretentious, confident prose that knows how to lift up an evocative detail. Even if it’s hard to exactly recommend in its current state, Unseelie can already be a lot of fun if you go into it with the proper mindset, and if it’s ever finished, it could well be something great.

As mentioned, this is a slightly old-fashioned kind of game where you wander around an underground world featuring magic – largely mushrooms with various unearthly powers, plus I suppose the woman whose portal-spell transports you into the aforementioned catacombs to begin with, though that’s more of a plot device than an element in the game as such – and anachronistic technology (plumbing, key cards, pressure plates). You’re not given much direction beyond a general desire to explore and hopefully escape back to your own reality, but there are enough obvious barriers and things to poke at that I found myself getting into the swing of things soon enough.

The writing definitely helps. It focuses attention on gameplay-relevant elements while not neglecting to set the mood, like this location description:

"The corridor ends here to the west in a metal gate beyond which you can see the outdoors—though a part of the outdoors apparently teeming with giant mushrooms and wickedly thorned plants. The sky outside is an odd shade of lavender that skies should definitely not be. A single thorny bramble extends through the gate into the corridor, winding along the stone floor."

It hits a deceptively hard-to-nail sweet spot, I think – these kinds of games work best when they don’t feel like bare mechanical challenges, but also can get frustrating if overly-elaborate language obfuscates the interactive bits you use to solve the puzzles.

Speaking of, the puzzle structure is rewarding, with new areas opening up as you explore and overcome obstacles, and a couple of moments when previously confusing or useless things come into focus, most notably when you reach the sole real NPC, who’s implemented fairly deeply and can tell you what all the fungi you’ve been finding can do. There’s also a fairly broad variety of things to do for what’s a relatively small game, from straightforward fetch quests and use-x-on-y puzzles to some that involve slightly more complex object manipulation and others that focus on the aforementioned NPC (a prisoner who promises to help you if you free him) or shifting the behavior of an animalistic native of this strange place. There’s nothing that made me slap my head in novelty and surprise, but equally, none felt illogical or like busywork, albeit there were a few where the clueing was noticeably thin – just the sort of thing that testing is good at smoothing out.

And yes, now that we’re talking of testing we have to come to the critiques, few of which I suspect will come as a surprise to the author given the caveats in the ABOUT text. While the implementation here is fairly robust, in terms of attention to detail, there are also a good number of rough patches – I’ll go into detail on the bug I mentioned above, since while it comes late in the game, spoiling the puzzle solution it pertains to will be a positive good to most players. See, at one point the complex quest chain to free the prisoner requires you to get a hypodermic needle that he’s got in the cell with him, due to some Geneva-Convention-violating stuff his captors got up to. But every attempt I made to take the needle or get him to hand it over ended in failure, with him annoying declaring that the needle couldn’t possibly be useful when I had a very clear understanding of what I needed it for. Turns out, I was on the right track, but the game was confused because there was also a needle-like thorn in the room, and the parser was automatically assuming I meant the latter rather than the former – referring to the HYPODERMIC rather than the NEEDLE cleared things up right away. Again, it’s a small quality of life fix that testing would immediately reveal the need for – but the lack of it wasted half an hour and burned quite a bit of goodwill.

(Oh, while I’m dispensing spoilers, I might as well mention that from glancing at some other reviews at transcripts, many players seem to be missing that (Spoiler - click to show)you need to examine the gap in the control room).

What’s here isn’t at all unplayable, let me be clear, but it’s also clear what we’ve got is a really fun Zork-like reduced to only moderate fun-ness and lacking half or so of the plot by the vagaries of its creation. Given all that, Unseelie’s entry into the Back Garden rather than the main festival makes sense – and if that decision was the author’s desire to test the waters before committing to doing the work to finish the game, hopefully this review counts as clear evidence of the need for, and upside of, that work.