Why Pout?

I beta tested Why Pout? in an almost-finished state.

Like a good portion of of Andrew Schultz’s catalogue, this is a wordplay game. Here, you’re manipulating homophones to transform objects.

Decent Plot Beats

I think I’ve played four of Andrew’s games over the last decade, most recently Tours Roust Torus in 2022. I get the sense that he constructed the world for Why Pout? a little more thoroughly than he did for his other games.

Why Pout? relies a bit on fantasy tropes, but never to the point of cliché, and it has some decent plot beats built around identity and comradery.

I don’t agree with BJ Best's criticism that the gameplay suffers from ludonarrative dissonance simply because the puzzles use arbitrary objects.

Looking to other games for precedent … one title that set a high standard in this regard is Counterfeit Monkey, which touched on themes of separation and unity both in its puzzle design and its plot/characters. It also featured an endless variety of shapeshiftable objects that were often out of place or inappropriate, sometimes to humorous effect.

Why Pout? doesn’t attempt anything as ambitious as Counterfeit Monkey. Still, I think that puzzles, wordplay-based or not, necessarily provide enough of a basis for any sort of plot about overcoming challenges. The specifics don’t always matter.

(I also think that no matter how well a wordplay game connects story and gameplay, it’s always going to feel a bit weird to play. That’s not a bad thing.)

Challenging Wordplay Puzzles

I also wanted to comment on difficulty. After reading a few other reviews, I think I can safely say that Why Pout? is a challenging game at times.

Most puzzles are mandatory. Critically, BJ Best had trouble with some of the same homophones that I did, particularly (Spoiler - click to show)MENSCH ELF and MANNA CURB (Mike Russo also had trouble with the second one. According to Tabitha it’s not mandatory, though? I thought it was.)

There were a few other ones I had trouble with. Part of the problem might be this: I believe Andrew was going for perfect or near-perfect homophones. I think that matches that don’t sound so perfect might be more intuitive. I think players would be more likely to try commonplace words even if those words are not perfect homophones — though I can’t prove it.

To be clear: even though I found the game hard, it wasn’t always hard. I got through a good chunk of the middle game without hints, and I enjoyed the parts I did solve on my own.

**Why Pout?** by Andrew Schultz

Andrew Schultz has a long history of making wordplay games which all follow the same general pattern (typing words based on an overarching wordplay theme using words that appear in the location) as well as a large repertoire of other games (like chess games and even a baseball game).

His longest running series, called 'Prime Pro-Rhyme Row', involves rhyming pairs of words. While fun, I had the feeling it was getting mined out.

This game takes on a fresh mechanic that still involves two-word pairs. Unlike the rhyming games, which could be slowly brute-forced by trying each letter of the alphabet and then adding multi-consonant starters, this puzzle type (which I won't spoil just in case) can be solved through multiple means, including auditory and mechanical, but with much less possible lawnmowering.

That's not to say it's trivial. I did use hints a couple of times. It turned out one puzzle was there that I didn't even realize was a puzzle that was gating all the others.

Anyway, the story here is mostly surreal, with a sequence of random, fantastical things that don't exactly fit a coherent narrative, but the overarching plot is heartwarming and fun: you're collecting friends. In different areas you find people that need help, and, in return, they help you solve more of your puzzles, and can give you pep talks as well.

This is a lot of fun. The pep talks can be nice, too. Some are more general and vague:

> The ________ discusses ways to identify people or situations that justneed a bit of help, and how to do so without making them feel
> hopeless or in need of help, or that they got themselves in this
> position in the first place.

while others are more concrete:

> You think up a ________ you mumble under your breath. The
> merchant finds it a bit weird you like THAT as a way to keep positive.
> It doesn’t seem like that sort of thing helps the economy. Their
> cheeriness slips slightly, with impressively-balanced potshots at
> people more and less successful than they are.

I prefer the more concrete ones, as they have a lot of character.

Overall, this was fun. Recommended for fans of wordplay parser games.

It feels like every Comp and/or Spring Thing, Andrew Schultz enters a big, robustly-implemented wordplay game bursting with bonus points, tutorial modes, hint mechanics, and support commands that together roll out a red carpet to experience a set of puzzles unlike anything anyone else in IF is putting together – and every Comp and/or Spring Thing, after an hour and a half I feel like my brain is leaking out my ears, that considerate hint mechanic is the only thing keeping me moving, and despite the inviting design I’m just too dumb to fully appreciate what’s being so generously offered. This doesn’t keep me from liking them, by any means; I had a really good time with this year’s Spring Thing entry, Beef, Beans, Grief, Greens, which was a little easier than usual because it’s like the fifth game with its particular wordplay gimmick (guessing double-barreled rhymes, as the title indicates) that I’ve played, and also because there was a strong theme unifying the various challenges. But there’s typically that barrier making me feel like I’m not fully getting the intended experience, since things never get completely intuitive.

Well, callooh callay, at long last I’ve broken the streak – the first puzzle here took me long enough to solve that I thought I was in for my typical experience, but somehow from that point on I was in the zone, almost immediately clicking onto Why Pout?’s wavelength and enjoying the heck out of it. I suspect the main reason is that the central challenge here is pretty much baby mode – instead of complex rhymes or pig Latin, all you need to master is dumb puns. The puzzles all center on being presented with (or, in the harder challenges, noticing in a longer description) a short phrase that can be read as a different phrase if you change the breaks between words – for a (dumb) example (that isn’t in the game since I just made it up), if you see “treat op”, you’d type in TREE TOP. It’s a simple enough concept that I always knew what I was doing, but the implementation manages to avoid being too simple, meaning figuring out the right answer was typically satisfying; I even needed to use the hint button two or three times, which felt about right.

Solving the puzzles is also fun because there are some legit great gags here; I ooohed with delight when I realized what I could do with “no notion”. There’s also a mechanic unlocking new capabilities when recruiting new companions, and it made me laugh to get a (Spoiler - click to show)mensch elf as a follower. Why Pout? also has figured out how to make hay out of a sometimes-awkward element in previous games, which is what to do about dirty words; the nature of wordplay games means that sometimes you stumble on one, and feel like you either have to or want to try it, even though that’s at odds with the sweetly innocent vibe the games generally transmit. But here all that stuff is segmented away into a separate bonus area, where you’re straight-up told to start swearing if you want or just leave, with no negative consequences, if you don’t; it’s an elegant way to deal with the issue, and I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that I solved just about all these puzzles immediately.

There are some places where the game isn’t fully polished – in particular, I found a couple of places where variant spellings weren’t accepted, making me think I was on the wrong track when I’d actually found the solution (Spoiler - click to show)(MANA for MANNA, MEETING for MEETIN’, WIPEOUT for WIPE OUT). But it’s hard to feel too aggrieved about that given the complexity of implementing this kind of game, to say nothing of the author’s impressive track record of doing mid-Comp and post-Comp updates to fix bugs and add further polish. Similarly, the narrative is entertaining enough, with some solid set-pieces (I liked visiting different islands with a squid, and supporting an alcoholic troll through recovery) and a positive message about self-esteem, but it lacks the unifying through-line boasted by some stronger games in Schultz’s oeuvre, and has a climax that feels like it’s over a bit soon – again, though, the fact that a long game focused so narrowly on one specific kind of wordplay is about to cohere at all is quite the achievement. And I’m not just grading on a curve; I had a smile on my face pretty much the whole time I was playing Why Pout?, and I’m having to exercise quite a lot of willpower to avoid spoiling too many of the jokes that got a laugh. This might be a beginner-level game compared to some of its peers, but it works equally well as a gateway into that larger catalog or as just a delightful stand-alone. The only down-side is that it’s got me directing even more awful puns at my wife than usual…