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Number of Ratings: 11
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3 people found the following review helpful:
Fight & Lun, February 18, 2024I enjoyed the idea of this game, but I didn’t feel it fully lived up to its expectations. Although the puzzles were definitely good and worked, I think it soon exhausted me. But very fun, maybe try and mix things up a little more, also maybe a little bit longer, but I thoroughly enjoyed what was there very much!
Song: I couldn’t find something that fully fits (also since not many of Radiohead’s songs are very goofy and lighthearted in the way this one is), but I found Permanent Daylight. Not my favourite song by far, unfortunately, and this game is very good, but the line “With your head on backwards” gave me the flipping-letters vibe.
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2 people found the following review helpful:
Word puzzler well implemented but not for me, January 4, 2024Unusually for this author this is a Twine piece, though using word puzzles and limited locations. It also has neat inventory management, and quite a streamlined interface.
However I wasn’t someone who could really understand what was going on. The game is based around spoonerisms. I had to google what that was again. And even then I still didn’t find the word manipulations at all natural.
The game starts “You’ve heard legends of a valuable trail stash 'round these here parts.” Was “trail stash” a spoonerism? Because I don’t know what that is either. Not a great start! Oh and I tried googling it, but that didn’t help.
After that I did a pretty extensive exploration of the branching puzzle tree, picking up objects as I found them, and trying using them in different rooms. This unlocked more parts of the game, and the map pieces I needed to collect to guide me to the treasure. As I got further in matching objects with the locations became easier. Though I’m still sure I wasn’t getting any clues from the spoonerism side of things.
In the end the game ended a little surprisingly. But I did quite like the ending.
But I don’t think this is a natural game for me to be comfortable playing. I have dyslexia type problems and other huge cognitive issues from my progressive neurological disease. So anything based hugely on word play is just a big problem for me.
But it was neatly implemented, and a quick play. I liked the way it marked off locations as you solved them. And if you do like these sort of word puzzles it might click more. Just not for me sadly.
Crooner Spam, December 20, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
This author is all over the map, we know this about him. He has produced games that tickled me, engaged my math-puzzle brain, and bounced me with material not for me. This entry recalls my favorite product line of his, the… Wordplay line? Here, we are engaging Spooneristic items and locations, trying to match them, to notionally transform them into their better Spooner partner! An example: I would give anything to turn a Gabby Trump into a Tabby Grump. (Cat-skeptics are much better than Mad Despots! That is its better form!) Should I use a generous do-gooder, the Gifty Nun or… the other? Ehh, maybe don’t ask me that question.
The fun here is the wild logic leaps it takes to use say a “dummy scoop” to somehow transform a “Zany Brew.” (NOT A REAL EXAMPLE. WELL, NOT EXACTLY.) They are not obvious, they are not fair, but boy are they fun. It is a somewhat trivial puzzle, easily solvable by trial and error, but much more fun when you try to outguess and predict what moon logic contortions are going to effect the transform. It is a short lark I took my time with. It lands where most short larks do for me - Insanely sparky just short of Engaging. Seamlessly implemented. Such a good use of 45min.
But really game, this is FAR from Trail Stash! I would purchase endless 50’s song compilations through Crooner Spam to get my Spooner Cram!
Played: 10/4/23
Playtime: 45min, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience feels complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
- dgtziea, December 13, 2023
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1 people found the following review helpful:
There's no Spoonerism for "Spoonerism", December 7, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I've played a lot of Andrew Schultz games, and while there are definite themes and sub-series, he’s a wide-ranging author and about the only thing that applies across the board to his work is that he’s always doing something other than regular parser stuff, be it anthropomorphized chess puzzles, an inverted tic-tac-toe game where losing is winning (and vice versa), or the extended wordplay riffs of Bright Brave Knight Knave, which I already played in this Comp. To my knowledge, though, outside of a few short jam entries, he’s typically stuck to parser engines for his more robust games, so I was curious to see what he’d gotten up to with Twine.
Trail Stash is actually not that far off from Schultz's other entry in the '23 Comp, Bright Brave Knight Knave, in that it hinges on Spoonerisms, a kind of wordplay the initial sounds of two words swap – like, you’ll win twaddle if you make a twin waddle (I don’t even know what the term is, if there is one, for the more complex stuff in BBKK and its ilk). The game’s replete with them – every location is a Spoonerism, and so are all the items you pick up along the way, because yes, this is a parser-like choice game with a persistent inventory and a navigation system that enables you to revisit places you’ve already been. And in fact you’ll have to, because each location contains one, and only one, item, and requires you to use one, and only one, other item to solve it (and thereby obtain one of a dozen pieces of a treasure map).
There is a story here, but it’s pretty vestigial even compared to the sometimes-sketchier frames for Schultz’s other wordplay games; it basically reduces to “you’re a guy who likes treasure, go find the map.” Likewise, if there’s any theme that unites the various situations and problems you face, it felt pretty light to me. Nothing wrong with that since it lets the player concentrate on the gameplay, and that suited me just fine. I often find the wordplay games a bit tricky, but shifting to a choice-based engine makes proceedings much simpler, since you just need to click the item you want to use; no need to sound things out and decide whether you want to write a word with an f vs. a ph, for example. Of course, that risks making things too simple and turning the game into a lawnmowering exercise, but I thought the game mostly managed to hit the sweet spot in between; with 16 total locations, comprising a training-wheel set of four and the meat of the game in four additional sets of three, the set of possibilities is manageable while still making trial-and-error unrewarding unless you’re really feeling stuck.
I also thought the hit rate for the jokes was pretty good. Plaid base is a good gag, as is funk pail. And I had to stop and think for a second when I found the one-word item to figure out how that one could work. And Trail Stash trusts the player enough not to belabor its point – it usually avoids spelling out the Spoonerism so that you can get the pleasure of feeling the click in your brain. I liked this description that came after figuring out how to solve the “weedy nerds” area:
"The weedy nerds are quickly very interested in the wee freights, be they ships or trains. The process of moving and organizing said freights gets longer. They analyze the structure of the freights and build bigger ones. All this is a good workout—something the weedy nerds once avoided."
Sure, not all of the puzzles are so clean, and I was definitely reduced to mechanically clicking through my options a few times, or left scratching my head after somehow landing on the right answer. But for the most part, I felt like I got the logic of which object I should use when. I’m sure this is partially because of the shorter running time of Trail Stash, so despite its name, it’s able to stick to the cream of possible Spoonerisms rather than scraping the bottom of the barrel. Likewise, this fresh twist on the Schultz wordplay formula would probably feel restrictive if it went on too long. But as an experiment in taking a tried and tested parser approach into new, choice-based territory, I’d rate the game a solid success.
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1 people found the following review helpful:
Twine based spoonerism wordplay game, November 22, 2023This is a game by Andrew Schultz, an author who excels at wordplay-based games.
But, instead of a parser game, it’s twine!
The conceit of this one is taking pairs of words in pairs (so 4 words total) so that if you switch the first letters or (or chunk of letters) of the first pair, you get the second pair. Just like the name: ‘Trail Stash’, if you switch the TR and ST, becomes 'Stale Trash".
I wondered how effective Twine could be in this format. After all, this is a similar concept to the parser games; would it be less effective here?
But as I played, I thought, ‘hmm, this is great!’. One of the difficulties I often have with the parser games by Andrew Schultz is that it is often uncertain how to interact when you have an item in a location; do you type the solution of the wordplay puzzle, or use a verb with the object?
Twine solves this problem by limiting possible interactions.
This doesn’t make things easy, though! I had difficulty near the end game where just nothing seemed to work. Then I realized that I had missed an important solution early on and missed out on three locations!
So overall, this worked well. The only caveats I had are below:
My one caveat is that there was no apparent connection between some of the items and the solutions. For instance, you have to detect losers, but the object is . Although, now that I think of it, I guess ’ has multiple meanings. So maybe it’s just my lack of imagination.
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2 people found the following review helpful:
Trash and error..., November 22, 2023 Trail Stash is a short-ish puzzle, where you must go through trash to find treasures. Along the way, you pick up items you can use to unlock new locations. As the story is rather not deep and quite nonsensical, the focus of the entry is meant to be on the gameplay. I could not solve the puzzle without the external map.
Trail Stash is the latest entry of Andrew’s experiments in SugarCube, which I got into with his Neo Twiny entries last June, where the focus is less on the story itself but what the code can do or what gameplay could be added to a Twine game. In this entry, it is all about a puzzle map, where you can pick up items, use those items, unlock rooms, and collect all map pieces to get to the ending.
Though it is humorous and you should take the story at the first degree, the puzzle itself is a struggle. There is no indication on what you are supposed to do, or even hints. When you finally manage to understand what’s going on after clicking on everything, solving the puzzle itself comes down to a trial and error, and error, and maybe a win, but mostly error, and an error again. If there was a certain logic in where to use which item, I did not find it…
Even while using the map, I’ve made many errors because I could not differentiate the colours.
Honestly, this felt a bit like one of those old school parser puzzle transplanted into a choice-based engine. Which is neat in and of itself, but didn’t really work… I found quite a bit of friction, with how the pages were formatted: with the locations being in a line, whole pages refreshing instead of a single line, or the inventory hidden*. That made, to me, the entry feel more like a proptotype.
*I think it could have worked better tagged at the end of the passage, with a popup on whether the combo worked or not…
Still, I’ve always found something interesting with these experiments, as it’s made me think of new ways to approach SugarCube or gameplay in general. There’s always something intriguing, making me wonder how things work under the hood. And this one is no different.
Not stale trash at all!, November 20, 2023Trail Stash is similar to Andrew's other wordplay games, but it’s written in Twine (Sugarcube specifically) rather than Inform—so it’s not up to the player to think of (in this case) spoonerisms, but rather, to figure out which of the spoonerized objects you acquire will be useful in each of the spoonerized locations. Success unlocks new locations, which yield new objects.
Being familiar with Andrew’s other wordplay games was definitely helpful in catching on to this one; the “use object in place” mechanic isn’t too hard to figure out, but it also is never spelled out, and the need to spoonerize the place names and object names to figure out which object goes with which place isn’t either. Of course it’s a matter of personal preference, but I don’t tend to enjoy when the first part of a puzzle is “figure out the conceit of the puzzle;” I’d rather just be told upfront. Of course, with the choice-based format of this game, it’s entirely possible to solve it by simply collecting all the items and then lawnmowering through them in each location; I tried to avoid doing this and actually think each one through, but I found some to be clued better than others, and I did resort to random guesses a few times.
I enjoyed Trail Stash as another entry in Andrew’s world of wordplay, but I do think it has a rather niche audience and isn’t going to feel particularly accessible to newcomers to Andrew’s work. But if the concept at all appeals to you, I definitely recommend checking it out!
- The Hungry Reader (California), November 12, 2023
- Edo, November 6, 2023
- Zape, October 5, 2023
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