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Review
This is the highest-rated Spring Thing game that I had never played. Jim Aikin is the author of Not Just An Ordinary Ballerina, which was one of my favorite games when I started playing IF.
The idea is that you're a farmhand working with your mean old grandma and you've finally saved up enough money to buy a ring for the girl you love. Unfortunately, your grandma's favorite duck swallows it! You have to head to town, deal with some supernatural encounters, and find a way to get that ring back!
This puzzle game is really complex. Almost every puzzle in it has multiple layers. I'd find a goal, progress towards it, be really close, then look at a hint, get past that, and realize there were two more things left to do.
It's like if you wanted to get a drink out a frosted-over freezer, so you find an ice-pick, but the ice pick is held by a goblin who wants peanut butter, and you find peanuts but they're expired, and you find a a grinding machine but it has no power source. Once you fix the peanuts and the machine (their own series of quests) you get the ice pick and pull out the drink but then you realize you have to thaw the drink.
That exact sequence isn't in the game but that's the kind of game it is. This is a great game for people who love charting out maps and examining every object and talking to every NPC.
I did find that frequently the answer was something that was hard to pick out of hundreds of possibilities. For instance, the surfboard. I thought that (Spoiler - click to show)TURN SURFBOARD N or (Spoiler - click to show)PUSH SURFBOARD could work but you have to specifically (Spoiler - click to show)get on it and LEAN RIGHT or LEAN LEFT. Similarly, many puzzles require asking one or two specific people about something you saw, but the vast majority of interactions with NPCS are '____ doesn't seem interested' or equivalent, so you have to really endure a lot of blank responses to get the good ones.
I used the hints heavily. The game itself was extremely polished and had no bugs or typos that I saw, and there were many amusing or interesting parts.
