Retool Looter

As I was playing this game, I thought, "This is exactly the kind of game I enjoy most easily: a polished kind-of-puzzly parser game with fun dialogue." It's amazing the reach that Charm Cochran has, from the gritty choice-based game We the Remainder that I first got interested in, to short story-focused games like 1 4 the $, to meditative and poignant games like Sundown and Gestures towards Divinity, to this game.

You play as a spy who has access to word-reversing technology. With it, you can reverse words you can see. Like Counterfeit Monkey, there is some thought put into world-building; people's perception of words (including your own perception) affects whether you can reverse something or not.

I enjoyed the riff on Spider and Web at the beginning with the lockpick, that was genuinely amusing.

The game isn't too long; there's really 3-4 sets of puzzles (the initial rooms, dealing with an NPC, a locked room, and the endgame).

It's an interesting balance of open-endedness and hand-holding. On one hand, conversations can branch a lot--but it often requires you to go through every topic. Puzzles have many potential solutions--but you're often given explicit hints about it and can ask for more in-game. This balance worked really well for me for 90% of the game. It broke down when it came to the puzzle with the (Spoiler - click to show)hammer. There were a ton of items that could potentially serve as a (Spoiler - click to show)handle in my mind: (Spoiler - click to show)the lockpick, a spare part, a branch of the retem shrub, maybe even the yam. But it's probably because I didn't know what a (Spoiler - click to show)spanner is and I dropped it early on as I didn't see a use. The hints didn't get explicit enough for me to know what to do and there was no walkthrough, so I looked for other reviews and saw what to do here as well as the next step which also seemed pretty unintuitive (but for which there is a hint). Now, this doesn't mean it's a bad puzzle; I barely struggled for 10 minutes before getting help. Someone patient and methodical could easily have solved it. It just stuck out when compared to the other puzzles.

Overall this was a good experience. I spent a long time griping above, but that was a minor divot in a good game.