Day Out

I sometimes wondered as a kid if my life would be radically different if I, say, chose one flavor of ice cream over another one day. The Butterfly effect and all that.

Well, that sort of happens here.

You are driving to work, and you stop at a gas station to refuel. You have a choice of four snacks to buy. Each one opens a different mini-story, and each mini-story gives you part of a message you need to decipher. Once I solved two of the stories, I had enough of the message to decipher it. I don't know if it's the author's intent, but it's a neat idea. And the snack images are neat low-res things that give me nostalgia for Apple and TRS-80, in a good way.

There are some puzzles, too, mostly of the logic type. There's "three people, one may be lying" and numerical patterns and so forth. I got talking animals in a forest and then an elevator where the desired floor was the answer to a puzzle. I missed on the animals in the forest several times, but it was forgiving and looped back until I examined stuff and figured things out.

This means Day Out isn't big on story, but technically, it works. However, it seems as though it would work a lot better in Twine, and the author may have confused "tutorial for others" with "tutorial for myself." The verbs are sensible but they are force-fed to you. So it's not great on teaching the player what to try first, and what to expect from their tries.

Part of this may be because English isn't the author's first language. I googled their name, since it was relatively unique, and their artistic side is rather interesting, at least on Instagram. It jibes with what I saw, where you had interesting whimsical drawings, and it's good to see someone with a large Instagram following move over here. The interlinking stories and secret messages are creative, if a bit random. For instance, with the elevator buttons, PUSH RED/GREEN/BLUE could just have three buttons to click, saving keystrokes. So it doesn't really play to the strengths of the parser, especially when I typed BLUE. Thankfully the HINT command bailed me out. So the author made serious effort to make things robust, though Adventuron may not have been the best tool for the job, especially since Twine allows graphics at least as easily too.

There was enough of that that my usual "I couldn't write something in another language" caveats and praise for courage aren't just fluff. There are spelling and grammar errors, but it's not the sort a native speaker would make, and when you see those it's easy/easier to be forgiving. I was definitely left thinking, okay, this person did what they could, and with more time to proofread and translate, this gets ironed out, no problem. I mean, you get a password just before the puzzles start, which is thoughtful of the author, and the passwords are rather amusing on their own. The author has a legit sense of humor, as I found by playing theie 2025 TALJ entry.

Though between checking off to say, yes, this is what the author meant, and fighting the parser a bit to get to the "good" ending, I was glad to cut things short initially. Guessing the "real" path through is hinted at several times in the story and leads you to a fun small sub-game of its own, which has almost certainly been done before, but it's satisfying.

This points to good and bad: I needed a break after the two times through, but I was interested in eating the other two snacks before judging ended, for more than just completionist purposes.

Day Out does provide fun but also has weaknesses: it does feel like puzzles with story slapped on a bit (I've definitely been in that boat, too, as a writer,) but I did like the blocky way-retro graphics, and I don't think that sort of aesthetic appeal happens by accident. But the game also has limitations, because the parser inhibits the experience instead of adding to it. However, if it weren't written in Adventuron, we might not have the cool graphics Adventuron seems to inspire. So Day Out may not be a great fit for the jam, possibly due to some misunderstandings, but it's still fun if you have guardrails. The author for his part seems to have made a parser game that would be trickier to do in Twine for TALP/TALJ 2025. The tutorial feels more fleshed out. But looking back on Day Out, it does have a rough "shows potential" charm, and the author built on this potential.