Us Too

I have to admit with great shame that this is my first Andrew Schulz game. I’m aware of the area of IF he had staked out, and every year I’ve intended with my whole heart to play his entry. This year I finally managed it.

Us Too’s main technique is wordplay puzzles about shifting the space in a two-word phrase and finding the right interpretation. This puzzle type took me a while to lock into by perfecting some kind of mental slurring of speech and then resolving into something new.

The whole experience was really quite unique. The wordplay melted my brain a little, having the direct analogue of A-ha moments of other puzzlers, but being something different. The writing is good but in a way not too consequential. The story and location kinda slid off my brain, and even in some way the puzzles too. But I was in a flow state looking for a unique phrase and deconstructing it. The writing doesn’t make this too obvious nor too obscure.

Some time in – after I was locked into the wordplay – I was wondering if the game could instead be a PDF of puzzles. Right then, the game started presenting more involved puzzles requiring chains of interactions.

This gave me the overall impression of Schulz’ expertise at creating puzzle games with appropriate pacing and ramp up. The writing is interesting but not an obstacle. There is significant infrastructure for hints, cheats and guides for the player. Everything is quite fair (although my play through came to an end with the puzzle which was a bit of a stretch for me). I enjoyed the game as an abstract puzzle game although it’s not presented as such. I feel wordplay puzzles have to be like this - embedded in story but slippery in the diegetics.

I enjoyed my time with Us Too. Time for me to start mining through the back catalogue!

Andrew Schultz's wordplay games can be presented on a spectrum between "the wordplay puzzles are extremely hard to guess without automated tools and/or lawnmowering" and "the entire game is trivial". This game is one of several that hit a sweet spot in the middle, closer to (but not on!) the easier side.

The mechanic here (which I won't reveal for spoilers) has small complexity and can be sounded out most of the time, making it not too bad. Another of this author's games, Wipe Out, is his third-highest rated game on IFDB, and I expect this one to end up high on that list as well.

I happily plowed through much of the early game and got about 35 out of 64 points on my own. After that, I had to consult the guide about 3-4 times. The main times I had to consult it were for puzzles that went beyond wordplay and required leaps of insight or finding patterns. I think those extra puzzles were interesting, and I wonder if I could have worked them out if I had been more diligent.

The plot is mostly held together by a common food-based theme. I enjoyed the help system and found it easier to use than some other games by this author, and I thought the ending was fun, though.

Andrew Schultz’s wordplay games have been a staple of IFComp for almost as long as I’ve been doing reviews, and I’ve generally enjoyed them. The switch in recent years to rhyme- or homophone-based gameplay has made the games a bit harder for me at times because my accent is not exactly the same as the author’s, but they’re still fun.

Us Too is a big, sprawling game with the classic setup of having to solve a bunch of puzzles in order to gain an inheritance from an eccentric relative. It’s also got food theming that helps tie it all together and makes it feel a bit more warm and cozy.

There are a few hint items, which were definitely helpful. (I did accidentally use the one that auto-solves puzzles for you in the process of trying to figure out what it did and thereby locked myself out of some bonus points, but the game will explain to you exactly how it works if you ask it to, so that’s on me.) The game does, however, contain some puzzles that aren’t word puzzles, and I wished there were some way of getting hints on those. (I ended up turning to the walkthrough to figure out how to access the various areas to the south and I’m still not quite sure how I was supposed to reach those conclusions based on in-game information.) The other thing I struggled with a bit is how often you’re supposed to return to the restaurant, which felt like it could have used some more in-game nudges; the final time in particular, I just went there because basically every other area was closed off so if there was anything left to get, it would have to be there.

The word puzzles worked well for me, though (occasional accent difficulties aside); I was usually able to reach the right answer after no more than a couple tries. The THINK command was also very useful in keeping track of cases where I’d come up with the right command but didn’t have the item needed to carry it out yet. Since there’s so much going on in the game, it was especially nice that it would tell me if I now had what I needed to solve an area’s puzzle. That the game will shut off areas that have no puzzles left to solve is also nice (and I think it does leave them open if there are optional bonus puzzles there still, which I appreciate).

The game also seemed quite polished; I didn’t encounter any notable bugs, and while it’s not a very traditional parser game, implementation seemed solid. And while the writing isn’t the draw for this type of game, it has its charming moments (I like the cowardly knight who (Spoiler - click to show)decides to become a surfer instead).

So, if you enjoy this type of wordplay game, Us Too promises an enjoyable couple hours of puzzling, with a lot of thought given to quality-of-life features.