And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One

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Fun To Read and Makes You Feel, December 20, 2022

Playing through this game was an excellent experience for me. The subject matter of the "plot," such as it is, hit home for me, emotionally. After I finished, I felt the same sort of refreshed that you do after a well-deserved cry.

This game has five-star writing, for sure. The creator is a talented writer, and clearly had fun putting personality into the descriptions and dialogues. Additionally, the detail is impressive; if you play this game, try to "examine" everything.

The technical implementation in this game is also top-notch. Nothing too fancy when it comes to the coding, but what is done is done well. This may be the first IF of B.J. Best that I've played, but it is clearly not the first that they've made.

This is not really a puzzle game. That's not to say that there aren't puzzles, just that they're simplistic and not really the point. Some people (like me) are into that; some aren't. If you want more art than puzzles in your interactive fiction, then this game is for you. If I were to rate this anything less than five stars, it would be for the simplicity of the puzzles; however, puzzles don't always have to be the point, and the simplicity helped keep the narrative / emotional journey moving, which IS the point of this game.

If you've ever experienced loss due to change, or change due to loss - and who hasn't? - this game will make you feel. What you feel depends on your opinion of the endings, I suppose.

A multi game with several different ways, March 27, 2022

I have previously played this game for the comp voting. Now I have played it again to the end.
Some quickly impressions:
It has some of the same vibes that Impossible Bottle. Player travels and interacts between some differents existence in-game plans.
The first third of the game is quite simple ad evoques a tutorial.
The second part is almost difficult if you don't realize that you are inside a game.
Finally, the third part of the game is a bit easier and leads to an autoexplaining ending.


So, the better is it's originality and plot, the story and develop.
The upgrading possibilities are a better descriptions and perhaps some more explanations.

I recommend to play it while it is warm.

- Jade.

Weird, sweet, nostalgic, metafictional, February 25, 2022

Firstly, I wish I'd played this before reading any reviews of it; even a few lines gave something away that would have been an amazing experience to discover firsthand. If you haven't played the game yet, go and do so. This is a spoilery review, including a major revelation in the ending I got, and ATYCTAHNUTPO is an extremely spoiler-vulnerable game.

ATYCTAHNUTPO is a game rooted entirely in text adventure nostalgia. It's a well deserved comp winner, and while innovative, it's probably one of the best counterexamples to the common complaint from nerdy middle-aged men that IFComp is getting too far removed from the puzzly parser text adventures they played as nerdy boys in the 1980s and 90s. It's a game about a nerdy teenage boy playing puzzly parser text adventures in the 1980s, or the idealised Stranger Things version of that time. That atmosphere is created skilfully by the prose -- you can almost hear the spinning wheel of your Raleigh Chopper carelessly parked against a Vote Dukakis yard sign outside. The nostalgia is mainly in the setting and story, but also from the storytelling form, which manages to be simultaneously traditional and highly inventive.

The first ten minutes or so are nothing but scenes from (fictitious) text adventures of that era, tiny two- or three-room fetch quests that feel procedurally generated. I've only played once, so I'm not sure if they actually are procgen, but they feel so much like it that I'm sure it's deliberate. These are interspersed with commentary from Riley, who is the best friend of the nerdy teenage boy protagonist, Emerson, who is playing games on Riley's parents' computer, in Riley's house, while Riley, your best friend, sits there and watches, I guess. It must suck to be your second-best friend. Anyway, after three or four of these mini-quests, Riley gets understandably bored and demands you play something else.

[EDIT: I later found out that the author deliberately never specified the protagonist's gender and Emerson is a gender-neutral name, so Em isn't necessarily a boy. Maybe I got a lot of male-coded vibes and/or maybe I made assumptions I shouldn't have. I'll leave the rest of this review as I wrote it.]

This opens up a small range of other minigames based on period-appropriate PC games and software: an OTT ye-olde-epic-quest roguelike RPG, a horrendous-quality edutainment program, and "strip poker" complete with squint-and-you-can-just-about-see-it ASCII boobs. All of these play out as mini-IFs in themselves, in a much more modern style, containing their own fairly deep characters, and they all cue revelations about the "real" characters' stories too, their families, their relationship, their out-of-shot lives, past, and hints of their future. The marriage of the shift to the modern, character-driven style with the continuation of almost parody-level "puzzles" that match the simplistic style of the introductory mini-adventures is interesting, and will give the nostalgia-loving players their fix while smuggling them into a more modern style of IF in a fairly subtle way.

As you play on, the lines between the various layers of fiction start to lose definition. The adventure games bleed objects and character knowledge into each other, then into the other in-game-games as well as the "frame" universe of you and Riley. This is expertly paced, not overwhelming at first, but by the end it's deliberately uncertain what layer of reality you're playing in at any time. Then a cut to an actual ending -- I've only played once, but I *think* there are multiple of these -- that (at least in the case of the ending I got) gives the character some closure, retroactively explains a lot of the seemingly prescient throwaway lines throughout the game about where the characters will be in the following years, and cements the nostalgic element by making this not just a game about being a teenager playing text adventures in the long eighties, but about being an adult *remembering* being that teenager. As one of those adults I can't help appreciating this... but we're not exactly people in desperate need of having our stories told.

Comparisons to both "Endless, Nameless" and "Photopia" are unavoidable: the former for the nostalgia and the gradual reality creep, and the latter for the fairly linear story and the main "perfect girl" NPC. [Mid-to-high-level spoilers for Photopia coming up.] OK, that comparison might not be totally fair: Riley is a *much* more solid character than Photopia's Allie, as low as that bar is, and -- in the path I got -- wasn't sent marching into a tragic ending because that's the inevitable fate of flawless female characters. In Riley's relatively few lines of dialogue and descriptive writing she gets far more characterisation than Allie, and even a few flaws in a "she's so uncool, isn't that cool?" sort of way. But I couldn't help wishing she had more agency of her own, and wasn't defined almost entirely by her relationship to the extremely audience-insert male player character. In my playthrough, the only point at which she seemed to have any significant control of the narrative was a short scene in which she took her top off. (To be fair, that scene didn't feel lascivious or inappropriate, another mark of skilful writing.)

The game is too well written for this stuff to bring it down, but for the same reasons, it's so well written that Riley feels like a missed opportunity. Often, following some revelation from the "games" universe, I tried to talk to Riley and see what she had to say about it, and got nothing but "1. Never mind" as a dialogue choice. If she's really my best friend, why can't I talk to her about stuff? The in-game-game protagonists frequently tell you "Don't worry, Riley can't hear us." If she's really my best friend, why wouldn't I want to share with her that I'm having a full-on paranormal experience in her house? Even towards the end, when I'm finally allowed to show her the cool stuff I've collected from the minigame characters, I'm happy to leave her thinking I thought of it myself. *My best friend.* I only hope I told her the truth some time before marrying her.

I can't compare this game to Photopia without noting that you and your character in ATYCTAHNUTPO have a lot more agency than the player/player character(s) in Photopia. (Or at least it felt like it -- after one playthrough, I can't be sure how much railroading was going on under the hood, but that hardly matters.) I've inferred from other reviews that there are multiple endings, and I found myself making choices out of genuine care for the characters. In a way it's doing some of the same things Photopia was doing, playing with expectations and using interactivity to explore a fairly static character piece, but much better. I also suspect that, like Photopia, ATYCTAHNUTPO will be better remembered for its innovative form rather than the story itself.

I'm better at writing about flaws in things I like than I am at writing about their good qualities, so I'll stress again that I really enjoyed this game. The writing is excellent; the characters, including Riley, all have a lot of depth squeezed into their limited screen time; the story is charming; and the form is original and artfully executed.

Be-vare, January 9, 2022

I got stuck three times in a row and the hints file didn't help. So I'm pretty shocked this got 1st place for a contest, unless that contest was to be worst "guess the verb" text adventure of all time.
All three play throughs I got past the first two easy quests no problem but the witch... You can't talk to her - she's on the phone. The other room has a locked safe - no key... anywhere. Can't "crack" it. Can't "break" it. Any verb you try fails. Any verb you try on the witch... fails. Pure evil
Hint's file for adv. 8 translates to "talk to infinite adventure Riley" but if you talk to the witch... nada. Talk to Riley... again, nothing. You could even put in those exact words in one go and nothing happens. So how is...? No, after three tries I quit.
[edited] - Ah! I see now. If you wander about long enough the "timer" seems to go off and you get to use a computer and more than that "x notebook" (which solves it). IMHO it's pretty dirty to do that to the player though.
I made a NeverWinter Nights game module back in the day with a cursed door that would spit chickens at you and you could only ever open it from the other side which you got to by finding a secret path to there through a graveyard on the side of the mansion. This "witch" scene reminded me of that (so, yeah, I'm guilty of stuff like this as well at least in one of the games I wrote).
All right I changed my rating up to 4 stars from 1 but it's still a bit tough at that one early part. Seems like you have to waste a bunch of turns to get it to progress from there and then, even then, have to ignore that there's a computer and resist the urge to "p" (play it) and x notebook instead.
Interesting game but still a bit bland in that there are only ever a handful of rooms to explore on each "play." Also, the thing is, if you were to ask people to beta test this they'd come up with a ton of "bugs" in that you can't examine certain nouns mentioned in the descriptions and such. To be a five star game I'd think the author should program in all the noun objects where mentioned in the text just to flesh it out.

Cute Enough, December 10, 2021

1: Is it complete and cohesive?
Yes. "And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One" has strong game mechanics and always leaves a path for you to follow. There is more than one way to complete certain quests and a concise list of verbs.

2: Interesting Mechanics
The trippy-ness of the game was charming. However, the experience I got was different from what I expected. (Spoiler - click to show)I expected the repetitive houses to continue until and become progressively different in slightly creepy ways. The actual mechanic of jumping in and out of computers was interesting, but left me wanting for the mechanics of the premise.

3: Storytelling
This is my main area of issue. This game just isn't meant for me. It has a cute little story which explores impermanence in our lives, but I just don't care about (Spoiler - click to show)romance. I also found that I was more interested in the characters of the CompuDoctor and the Witch than I was in what were supposed to be the main characters.

Overall a decent game that allows for multiple solutions but tends to railroad for the sake of emotion. Provides a good atmosphere and an interesting enough story, but not my cup of tea.

A discussion of what nostalgia is and should be, December 4, 2021

ATY (we don't need the whole acronym) quickly establishes itself as metafiction: you, Em (short for Emerson,) are playing a distinctly mediocre game called Infinite Adventure with your friend, Riley, who's about to move away. You're young enough to still forgive programmers for the sort of simplicity found in IA, but you're old enough to want more and to start feeling bored. But these games are what you have. So you play them. You give an elf a carrot, because giving them a feather doesn't work. This continues until you and Riley realize that this is not the greatest way to spend time together before she leaves. And there's a nagging feeling you two aren't discussing what really matters.

There's not much to do besides play games, though, especially with the weather. Now part of ATY's task is: how to we make a game-in-a-game that's clearly boring, without making the game boring? Well, it makes several offerings, all of which are boring in their own way, but certainly back in the '80s this sort of variety felt like it had to be interesting. There's Infinite Adventure, featured in the blurb and cover art, which ... goes on, in its "give x to y" sort of way, until it's broken and you don't have the item you need to help a witch get organized. At this point, your in-game computer's menu reveals three other games: Warriors of Xanmor (all stereotypical adventure games should have an X,) Strip Poker and CompuDoctor. Each is a simplistic game with an adult NPC. All three have holes in their own lives. They're far from perfect. But each gives you appropriate distance from their shortcomings,. Strip Poker has impressive ASCII art which shows someone reclining without, well, showing anything. CompuDoctor is mostly textwalls with egregious typos (they're there for a purpose.) And Gardon, Warrior of Xanmor (the first NPC you meet) does the whole elevated middle English thing before lapsing into more normal chat or, once you're done chatting, estimating his experience points or performing other fourth-wall-breaking activities. There's also a shop in Xanmor, but your adventuring won't give you any currency it needs.

He needs something, and so does your opponent in Strip Poker and the doctor in CompuDoctor. Each one of them irks you in their own way. That's partially your own immaturity and part their own shortcoming as adults. There are particularly good parts here where you don't even want to talk to the doctor because he knows to much about you, and your strip poker opponent knows you aren't eighteen but tries to give you advice about growing up. And the three NPC, well, they know of each other, at the very least. And when I played through quickly, each time I had to give slightly different items to each NPC, which was a nice bit of flavor. But I think the best part is solving the 5th iteration of Infinite Adventure and beyond. AUTOPLAY gets you through and pushes the story right when you worry it's sagging a bit. It senses you get the point of how grinding is fun, until it isn't. Plus it signals things are going to go off the rails, both in terms of the game's realism and Em's own frustration.

There's a feeling of just extending time together for its own sake that the game captures well, then there's a flashpoint to what's brewing, because Em and Riley clearly have things they want to say but can't, and the adults in the games help them with that. And in fact you have the option at the end of explicitly not doing anything for Riley, or only doing part of what you can do, which affects the ending you choose. I enjoyed comparing them.

And things like this made ATY so much more than a look back with regret, or nostalgia, or whatever. For starters, I thought of how neat it seemed when I was 5 that a computer could almost sort of have another person inside it, or seem to, but I didn't realize what that realism would entail. Then there are shout-outs to other things from the '80s. They're not joyous, just mentioning, we liked this, but maybe there was better. The Amulet of Werdna is one. Wizardry's a good fit because it never really grew technically or provided a story, and it only slightly became less oppressive for starting players, and you could get nostalgic for it while missing Bard's Tale or Ultima. For me, Wizardry nostalgia was about making unbeatable characters with byte-editing and running through quickly, then discovering sibling folders on Asimov.net for RPGs I'd never heard of--and they were so much better once I had the guts to poke around or pay for an eBay copy of Quest for Clues.

As someone who can listen to one song on a loop, the Journey CD (CDs, wow) with references to newer, more experimental bands ring a bell, too. So the callbacks aren't just to cover retro-cred bases but to say, yeah, this was neat, but a bit was missing. So I had some regret that I never really got to discover BBSes or phreaking or assembly language, but ATY balancing things right still reminded me of long or slow goodbyes to certain friends, and even to ones I thought were my friends. Sometimes that good-bye was expected. Other times, maybe I should've seen it coming. I went to a big high school and had a feeling I'd stop being in classes with some people I'd liked to have seen more of. I had friends who showed me cool things and semi-friends who did, too, but they hid the GOOD stuff, and some of these friends-on-paper made me feel I couldn't share with others, or maybe I didn't deserve to share with others, and I felt the same sort of regret Em seems to if you end things wrong.

But ATY doesn't really dwell on things, or if it does, it makes it clear dwelling is not healthy, even if we can't see anything better. It has four possible endings, based on how well you want to remember Riley. They all bring up how dumb the Infinite Adventure game was but have different levels of contentment. But in any case, it does something good, which is to put in perspective some of the silly stuff I enjoyed, not just computer games, or stuff I played just because it was there or winnable, and that's not something to have nostalgia for. Maybe it was a game my friends and I all got better at until we hit a rough ceiling,and we should've been learning other skills instead. But it's also hinted when the adult characters inside the computer programs indicate that they want to move on, and Em has issues to address.

ATY was a tough one to replay, not due to quality issues, but because it was about how replaying lame stuff or nostalgia in general isn't healthy. The author mentioned in his postmortem a quote that nostalgia is anger misplaced, and I've certainly seen that when I've played through something old and thought "I wish I'd gotten the hint book earlier/had friends to share ideas with," and these thoughts often turn to "I wish I had more to be nostalgic about, like the trickier Infocom games." There are good memories, of course. And we should be able to get a lot of neat things from something that seems stupid on the surface. And looking back, I never realized how many adults I looked up to mixed in anger with their nostalgia. But I also think nostalgia is fear misplaced, or it has been for me. I want to try new things, but not really, just as Em and Riley like Journey, but it's hard to discover new things--what if we don't like the new thing as much? All the while, Infinite Adventure, the safe bet, gets more boring on replay. We're looking for something that isn't there. We do find new stuff, but less each time. I know even old beloved games get old, and sometimes (as with 2400 AD) the best part is finding a clever shortcut to make things go quicker. Narnia and the Chronicles of Prydain, well, I felt sad re-reading and finding nothing really new.

So I definitely worried ATY would have these severe diminishing returns to scale. It should be replayable on paper, but I think I paid enough attention to say: wait, ATY doesn't encourage too much of this sort of thing. I found ATY spurred me to try things I left out--that is the best you can hope for, grabbing onto someone's nostalgia and saying "Hey! I never saw that! I have a chance to now!" whether it's an old game or old video. Perhaps it's literal, where ATY mentions phreaking or some bands I never heard, or it reminds me of friends who said "What!? You never saw popular movie X?" Certainly the isolation ATY provides--the bulk of the real-world game takes part in place--reenforces that some nostalgia I had was itself too self-focused.

I remember on one gaming forum I had friends who liked retro games, but I knew I was looking for something different, and people wrote reviews, and eventually the reviews became more polarized, and the more aggressive personalities cut down favorite nostalgic games like Kickle Cubicle before leaving because "this place got a bit boring, no offense." I'd just never considered the anger angle before. The gradations of anger are reflected nicely in ATY's endings. But I also remember nostalgia as "boy, my friends and I were happy before we got bored of each other" and taking a while to realize we weren't a great long-term fit, and both sides may not have tried hard enough to find people they could grow with. ATY reminded me of several people like that--people I'd like to hook up with, but I wonder if we'd really talk about what we'd done since then and what we want to do, or if we'd get stuck.

I feel I don't have the qualifications to pick apart fully how good the meta-narrative is, but I think it must be Pretty Darned Good, as it reminded me of departures through college and beyond. It reminded me of people who said "keep in touch" and people who meant it, of people I should've gotten on with better. It made me Google a few dimly-rememebered names. I didn't dwell on whose fault it was we didn't get together more. And it made me (re)visit stuff I never got around to, in a way a detailed article or someone saying "OMG you have to listen to this" (or memories of people who bragged they knew it but never gave details--again, maybe a bit of anger on my part here they didn't share) never could. And, of course, it reminded me of the objectively boring things that provided bonds, even if they should not have, on paper. And even if those bonds were with people I ultimately fell out with, for reasons right or wrong, they were still there and far more real than the times I looked at something nostalgic and thought "this should cheer me up." And it should have, on paper, but it didn't.

So games like ATYC are extremely valuable to me. I wind up pushing myself to do or try a bit more than expected, because I don't want to be like Em thinking back too much to how things were, no matter how happy Em is in general. It certainly makes me want to try new things when writing (I worry I get in a rut) or coding (it's so easy to use the old packages you first learned and try to recreate the "Hey! This works!" excitement without trying for that next step) or, well, visiting new places. Works with exotic locales and exciting characters don't do it for me nearly as well. My feeling looking back is that Gardon and the doctor and Ashley don't need to be disturbed, but that also applies to real people and some of their memories, and I know I need that to block out possibilities that don't lead anywhere, to focus on the ones that will.

A worthy winner!, November 24, 2021

Wow! This was a fantastic game! Not too long, or too hard to complete, and a really really well written story!

Something Special, October 31, 2021

I really appreciate the fact that the blurb for this game doesn't give anything away in terms of how it evolves. It starts out as two friends playing some 80s computer games, which initially seem to be silly and short. There are a number of surprises waiting as you progress, drawing the player in ever further, while upping the stakes in terms of challenge as well as emotional involvement. I personally found the game to be pretty moving, making me generally concerned for one character in particular. I believe the ending I found reflected my choices fairly, but I am anxious to play again to see where else it could go. It had a clever mechanic that seemed pretty unique, and it only got a little too melodramatic once or twice. In terms of the IfComp 2021 competition, I consider this game to be (Spoiler - click to show)the frontrunner.

A game about playing games and young friendship, October 16, 2021

This is a complex game where you play computer games on a computer inside the computer that you're now viewing. While you do that, someone in real life (inside the game) comments on what you're doing inside the game (inside the game).

There are multiple games and multiple things in real life, and elements transfer from one to another (kind of like IFDB spelunking).

You are a teenage boy whose best friend (a girl named Riley) is moving away, and in a partially-packed house you are spending your last few hours together playing old adventure games on a computer.

Meta verbs are disabled; I opened up the game one day and then came back to it a week later and was shocked I couldn't RESTART. Then I tried it on a different device and the first thing I saw was a mention to use EXIT to 'truly' restart. UNDO is disabled, as well.

This game reminds me of several games of Adam Cadre. The meta-nature of playing a game and a game within a game with self-aware NPCs reminds me of Endless, Nameless. The piecing together of a story and focus on simple puzzles with 'aha' moments and emotional interactions reminds me of Photopia. And the inclusion of strip poker (not my favorite element) reminds me of many of Adam Cadre's works.

Overall, this is a great game. It's fresh, easy to pick up, sophisticated, and ties in elements of narrative IF and classic parser IF.

It has a companion game, Infinite Adventure, playable only using a DOS emulator. That is just an endless series of simple fetch quests. Interestingly, this game is also essentially a long series of fetch quests, making them mechanically very similar and story-wise very dissimilar.

I think the game worked for me on an emotional level. I like almost everything about this game, actually, but I don't think I'll replay it because the strip poker level on an old DOS computer brings back bad childhood memories. However, I'll probably replay it for some 'best games of the last ten years' article, so I'll still give it 5 stars.

Nostalgic, surprising, multilayered, October 11, 2021

I really appreciated this game as a straightforward narrative, as a reflection on IF nostalgia, and as a multilayered mystery to unravel. The story is beautifully recursive, and the way the gameplay ties itself in knots is just fun. The descriptions and parser responses were entertaining and full of detail. Certain events felt slightly uncomfortable, but resolved in ways that made the conclusion even more satisfying—at least it felt like a conclusion, though it seems very possible I still have more to discover.

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