Not so Happy Easter 2025

This is maybe just an example of I-wouldn’t-want-to-belong-to-a-club-that-would-have-me-as-a-member preciousness, but despite playing a lot of old games, I don’t consider myself a retro-gamer. Like, I will happily play Gold Box RPGs until the cows come home, and not just the later ones when they finally adopted VGA, since 1988’s Pool of Radiance is obviously the best: I sincerely find it more fun than just about any other game released this millennium, and still run through it every couple years. But I don’t think that’s born of nostalgia, since my main memory of playing that game back in the day is that it was too hard for me and I always got frustrated trying to push too far into the slums of New Phlan and then getting slaughtered before I could make my way back to safety to rest. Similarly, I don’t have much attachment to the trappings of old games – I know there are DOSBox settings to get period-authentic audio and apply CRT-aping filters so the pixels don’t look quite so sharp, but I’ve never had the slightest interest in exploring any of them.

I don’t think this reflects any inherent virtue – we’re just talking about the aesthetics of entertainment products, and besides, I definitely do fetishize stuff like old books so who am I to judge? But it does mean that when I come across an artifact like Not So Happy Easter 2025, which despite its up-to-the-minute title is presented as a game file for the ZX Spectrum (a UK microcomputer whose popularity was already on the wane by the time Pool of Radiance came out), it leaves me somewhat nonplussed. I’m certainly capable of firing up an emulator and adapting myself to an old-school design, but the text delay and chunky yellow font, which I’m sure stir the heart-strings of some players who suddenly remember being eight years old again, just make me sigh and wish I could just be playing this thing in a modern interpreter.

Admittedly, there are practical reasons why I had those thoughts. NSHE lacks conveniences like being able to press up to recall the previously-typed command, and instead of L being a shortcut for LOOK, it instead reloads a pre-configured save game, which meant I lost all my progress half a dozen times before I retrained my muscle memory (PSA: you can actually save and load the game with RS and RL, respectively, and if you do that sufficiently often it’s much easier to recover from the occasional mis-typed L). And I found that even with the emulator speed cranked up a bit, typing too fast would lead to some letters getting dropped from my commands, adding an annoying bit of friction to every single interaction in the game. Again, I understand that some people might dig this; friction isn’t always bad! But in this case, I’m not “some people.”

Fortunately the game itself is idiosyncratic enough that the format isn’t the most interesting thing about it. It appears to be set in Czechia, for one thing, but more than that, the setup swerves from slice of life to thriller in a way that more grounded, modern games are typically loath to attempt. See, you start out looking for some kids who got lost doing an Easter egg hunt you designed, before getting a call from a deranged weirdo who tells you he’s kidnapped them and will only release them if you find and hand over several allegedly-magical Easter-themed MacGuffins (the plot has one more twist in store, too). This is overlaid on what are admittedly pretty standard medium-dry goods puzzles, but the novel context does add something to the proceedings, and the game’s gonzo approach did make me grin when a Tesla model called “the Swasticar, [which] goes from 0 to 1939 in three seconds” (you can get it towed, which made the grin bigger).

Unfortunately the puzzle design is as spiky as the interface. There are times when you need to repeat the same action multiple times to progress, with no indication that that would lead to a different result the second time. The stripped-down approach to narration means that some puzzles are harder for the player than they should be, since for example the protagonist would be able to tell that the giant rain-barrel is currently empty just by looking at it (and therefore filling it would help you retrieve what’s inside it). And in an attempt to prevent players from inadvertently solving puzzles before they’re supposed to, some commands only work if you’ve followed a prescribed set of previous steps, which stymied me a couple of times because I’d hit on the correct course of action but the parser was stopping me without any adequate explanation. Oh, and the game uses USE, which as always is a can of worms – I tried to get the Tesla towed by PUTting a ticket on it, which seemed the intuitive approach, and had to run to the walkthrough to realize I’d been thinking too specifically.

That walkthrough does exist, though, which is a nice concession to modern sensibilities, and as a result I was eventually able to get to the surprisingly-happy ending, and I’m satisfied about having done so. Not So Happy Easter 2025 doesn’t exactly make a case for the unvarnished glories of the 80s for those who missed out on them – I still would have had more fun if it was a bog-standard Inform game – but even the thoroughly modern can have some fun here (just remember that walkthrough!)