Give Me Your Lunch Money

In this game, you're an 8 year-old inventor who gets bullied on the playground, and has to set up traps to use on the bullies the next day. You find all the materials you need by exploring your house, featuring a few small puzzles. Assembling the traps is fun and the game gives you a good amount of clues, there aren't any super complicated or interconnected puzzles.

Also, you don't need to solve everything: you only need three traps, and I ended up making four. My favorite was the dart gun that launches a superglued sticky note on the bully's back, and you get to write whatever you want on the note. Seeing all the traps in action is satisfying and you can easily picture how they play out.

I like that you get a sense of what the protagonist's family is like just based on the narration and what they have around the house, and the ending climax plays out well. I think the writing in this game could be pushed a bit more -- it's good but not great. There's also a few issues with synonyms not being recognized. Still, this is a simple, lighthearted story that I enjoyed.

This is a fun adventure, clearly crafted with original thought and care. The potential for combinatorial explosion is pretty evident in the design-- here the author has simply not gone for completeness as a solution-- but for me this felt forgivable. Besides, if the story of a picked-on kid standing up to three bullies with nothing but his imagination and love of invention doesn't capture your attention, you might only be half a human being. Plus, it's got its own soundtrack.

Full disclosure: I did some beta-testing for the ADRIFT release of this game.