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Review
Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review
Played: 4/18/26
Playtime: 45min, 2 endings, 1 achievement
There are honestly a LOT of things I like that just flat baffle my family. I don’t mean ‘oh that’s not for me, but it makes him happy’ like IF. I mean ‘HOW ON EARTH CAN YOU LIKE… WHAT DID GRAMMA AND POP POP DO TO YOU, DAD??’ Tinned sardines are one such item. Spiders and insects are another. In my life I have spent SO MUCH energy trying to explain to loved ones why these creatures are FASCINATING, ACTUALLY and it only ever made me more of a monster in their eyes. Somehow my hair trigger passionate defense of Bug’s Life has become a punch line when I AM TOTALLY RIGHT ABOUT IT. So I’m just going to accept my fate as a specist paraiah without explication. Bugs are cool. I accept your scorn.
Bugs that are also musicians? Are you just cherry picking from my brain pan now?
This work is a really tight parser, marrying anthropomorphised insects with ‘getting the band back together’. It is Bug’s Life meets Blues Brothers and SAY NO MORE, I AM YOUR UNCRITICAL CHAMPION. Your mission, young Flick, is to assemble a band to honor the moon. Each of your four bandmates are beset by predators or their own damaged psychology and you can free them with the power of music. And cleverness. The puzzles are nicely diverse - each requiring slightly different approaches, but culminating in a common (organically established) musical capstone. Each of your fellow musicians have unique stories and engaging personalities. The vibe of the whole thing is so generous, so empathic, even the (scary) external threats are clearly not EVIL, just doing their food chain-given work. Except maybe that demonic mole rat.
So what you have is a work that drove DIRECTLY into the most shunned, shameful corner of my interests, presented me with fun parser puzzles and a warm story, and you want me to nit-pick it? Maybe ask my family, I am ON BOARD. Everything about this work appealed to me: its hand drawn map, its bugs-eye-view environs, the heavy lean into folklore surrealism. Not least of which its prose. I am in the habit of grabbing quotes from text to support my claims, but here the only quote I grabbed was “pungent enthusiasm.” That wonderful phrase was deeply representative of the piece, conveying its sardonic warmth with every sentence. If you have no room in your life for the wry absurdity of that construct, I feel bad for you.
If I had a complaint, it would be that it was too short a work. Seems like good news on that score too: this appears to be set in a shared universe of (hopefully) more works to come. Have I ever penned a review that didn’t have at least ONE substantive quibble? It doesn’t feel like me, yet here we are. This is the best I can do. My quibble is I WANT MORE. Jake Blues, help me out, I have turned into a shallow, cheerleading shill. How can I close this fawning review?
“We’re on a Mission from MOON.”
(Hey is it a character flaw that my positive reviews are often MUCH shorter than my critical ones? I’ve got to figure out a wordier way to say “I really liked this!”)
Spaceship: Fhloston Paradise
Vibe: The BeEtles. Seriously, THE BEE…
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my work, I would beef up the drummer-bug’s puzzle and role. Really center the narrative around him, dig into his background, his quirks, his musicianship. Maybe engineer some rhythm-game gameplay into his vignette. I would also… what’s that? I am a drummer, but I don’t see how that’s…
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
