Us Too

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.