Reflections

Reflections is a brief and charming game in which you play as the grandchild of a sorceress trying to awaken your magical powers, which are connected to mirrors. Your grandmother is, in fact, the Evil Queen from Snow White, but other than the mirrors there isn't much connection to the story, and the PC's family doesn't come off as particularly evil, even in an aesthetic sort of way. I admit I half-expected an Addams Family type vibe, but save for the references to the Evil Queen, you might as well be a regular fairytale hero/ine, albeit a twenty-first-century one with a smartphone.

Because this game was made for the Text Adventure Literacy Jam and the tutorial is an important part of the goal there, I played with tutorial mode on even though I didn't strictly need it. The tutorial mode seemed well-constructed, starting by explicitly giving you the commands to progress in the first room and then falling into a more hint-like role. The game also seemed like a solid introduction to the kinds of tasks one might have to accomplish in a standard text adventure--examining the environment to find hidden objects, finding a light source to go in a dark cave, getting past hostile NPCs.

The art was very cute and the onscreen map was helpful (my main struggle as a parser player is that I have no sense of direction or ability to remember what is where). I also appreciated the opportunity to interact with various cute animals.

I did have some issues with the parser; the game says it accepts only two-word commands, but in practice more complex commands (PUT thing IN thing or GIVE thing TO NPC) are understood just often enough to trip you up when they're not. I also had some guess-the-verb issues unrelated to that, notably with the dirt piles, and struggled with (Spoiler - click to show)having to refer to the crystals as a unit in order to get a disambiguation menu to interact with a specific crystal, despite the fact that they're called out individually in the room description. But it's possible that my parser experience and learned habits are working against me here and the game's target audience would actually have less trouble than I did.

I wonder if the story and aesthetics are pitched a little young relative to the age of a child who would be able to comfortably play a typing-heavy game and read some of the bigger words used. My feeling (as someone who works in an education-adjacent field and does sometimes have to vet texts for reading level appropriateness) is that the content says ages 7-9 to me but the reading and typing aspects say 10-12. I do think it would be a great game for a child and adult to play collaboratively, though.