All That Shimmers...

You’re sitting in your house and you’ve just finished breakfast. You see a newspaper headline about a suspicious person who’s recently moved into the neighborhood and just might be a witch. You decide you’d like to do some snooping around town and find out for yourself.

This is a very funny call to action for a text adventure, and All That Shimmers… contains plenty of chummy humor to match the premise. The writing is both functional and charming, with lots of amusing details about the people and places in your neighborhood. Suspicious things keep happening, and the narration tells you just how suspicious you are about it. And you are!

As for the puzzles, these are all pretty much the standard pick-up-and-use-things variety. Nothing particularly devilish, more a way to make you feel like you’re investigating a mystery. And you do! A couple highlights: (Spoiler - click to show)Including a helpful ghost as hint mechanism was inspired, and it made me laugh when, after all the setup about how good your hearing is, you need to crack a safe purely by ear, instead of, like, finding the combination.

I couldn’t tell at first if this was going to be a straightforward old-fashioned text adventure or if it would attempt to subvert expectations by making the witch a good guy or something like that. Turns out (Spoiler - click to show)it’s the first one. But the game doesn’t feel old-fashioned, either in tone or challenge level.

This game was an entry in (and won!) PunyComp 2025, which had a requirement that the player must interact with an animal. And the animal interactions were fun! Unlike some other text adventures, these interactions are not violent. (+1 bonus point for the great response to “>pet mouse.”)

I did spot a few typos, so it probably could use another editing pass, but nothing that gets in the way of enjoying the adventure.