Not so Happy Easter 2025

This is a ZX spectrum game that I played on an online emulator. It worked great; the only issue I had was that I have the habit of typing L for LOOK whenever I want to see if a room changed, but typing L in this game randomly scrambles your game by putting you in a random room with random objects.

Because of that, I used a walkthrough for everything after the first area.

You play as someone trying to help find some lost children. To your dismay, you soon find evidence that they were kidnapped, and you have to go on a dangerous easter egg hunt to find them.

The game has a helpful vocabulary list to help you get around, and has some classic tricky puzzles (like an object floating in a nearly-empty barrel that you just can't quite reach). Some of the puzzles rely on things like examining objects twice and waiting for events to happen, and quite a few have adventure-game logic where you know you have to do something but couldn't really predict the result (like the use of the ice cream, for instance).

Overall a solid, shorter adventure thoroughly grounded in Spectrum and Spectrum-era gaming nostalgia. For fans of the era, it will be a real treat. For people used to recent parser games, it may be less guided or player-friendly then what they're accustomed to.

This game requires an ZX Spectrum emulator like Fuse, which I used.

EDIT: Be aware that this game uses a few stereotypes which could feel quite offensive and I believe the game would be better without it. However, the game still has a lot of good things in it and it would be simple to improve it in a post comp release, which I hope will happen, as it is otherwise a nice game. My original review below is unaltered.

This is a really neat VERY old school parser game for the sake of puzzles. They were fun to work through. I almost solved it in 1 hour and 50 minutes but had overlooked an obvious connection to a location so had to peak at the walkthrough. So the puzzles are definitely fair but if you are not used to the simplistic PAW parser (? I think this is a PAW game?), you will have to get used to it first. So it actually does accept up to four words when it makes sense, e.g. USE X ON Y.

Most importantly, typing L will ruin the game, but if you ramsave once in a while you can just type RL to ramload again. Instead use R to look around (Redescribe).

The entire game is relatively well implemented, considering it is a PAW(?) game. The atmosphere is cute despite some horror elements. A very nice feature is the VOCAB commands which tells you ALL the verbs you need to know and typing HELP toggles between 4-5 different hints. They were a nice addition which I applied, so I did not really need the walkthrough except when I missed a room connection :/

Overall, a very fun retro experience!