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Review
This 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.
