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But Not Too Familiar, July 12, 2023Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review
Played: 4/12/23
Playtime: 1hr
Oooh, this was a fun one. Retro font, graphics and sensibilities married near perfectly to retro gameplay. The game makes really smart decisions, limiting the verbs available to a very small list. This effortlessly casts aside the vocabulary guessing part of parser play and focuses on the story and puzzles. It also has a perfect in-game rationale. You’re a crow, how many verbs do you need? (Feel free to use that as a cover blurb.) It is hard to overstate just how well all these elements play with each other. At no point are you thinking “well, this would never have actually been on screen back in the day.”
The text is a full partner in the time warp surrounding the game. Descriptions are tight, evocative, with just the right blend of concrete detail and suggestive back story. If there’s a noun, you better believe there’s a description. (paraphrasing, wish I’d grabbed it)
">X BIRDS
A flock of birds flying past. You don't recognize them."
Lol, that is just old school personality right there. Not a word wasted!
The art is also spot on. Every location has an 8-bit rendering whose distinctive image matches text description, and carries the mood effortlessly. Your encounters on way to gathering the spell elements you need are varied and melancholy. It’s not high adventure, it’s encountering people and places with full histories you just happen to intersect with briefly, so they can give you stuff. Just like life!
There’s a few things I might wish for: maybe one or two more verbs to add nuance to simple puzzles; an alternative to crow backpacks; a subversion of (Spoiler - click to show)an enemy’s all-too-expected endgame return; some minor typo and bug fixes. But none of those are hugely impactful. This work has excellent moving parts that combine to make something even greater - a precisely paced, pitch perfect portal to the past.
Pastiche/homage is hard to do well, near impossible to do this well, and often unappreciated as an endeavor. I’m here for it. I SEE YOU, CROW!
Spice Girl: No Spice Girl! Will go with “Jem and the Holograms” here, as 80’s predecessor. I’m reaching, there’s no true connection there.
Vibe: Old School
Polish: Smooth
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were my project, I would probably spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to eliminate the backpack, only to conclude that every solution made gameplay more frictiony and less fun. Like a LOT of time coming to that conclusion. So many attempts, each worse than the last. Then just go back to the backpack. As an afterthought, I would fix some bugs and typos, to somehow legitimize all that wasted time.
Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.