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Number of Ratings: 12
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1 people found the following review helpful:
Bizarro Job Hunt, July 12, 2023Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review
Played: 4/7/23
Playtime: 20min, 3 endings
This entry lives up to its title, without doubt. There is a loose plot about finding a job, but so not the point of it. This is another (the third so far in Spring Thing23!) IF patterned after a joke: setup and punchline, no goal but to make you laugh. This one struggled a bit to find its footing, I felt. It is rife with misspellings, awkward sentences, and questionable grammar. An early gag about mistaking computer for social networking was structured too loose to land, but there was something there. It just felt like the language was making me do a lot of the work to find the humorous core of the idea.
When comedy is most effective on me, not only do I not have to work, the language is a full partner in laughs. It is the sharply honed needle that injects that uncut, industrial strength funny right into my brain. Which is not to say that there were no chuckles. In selecting a book (after selecting your wardrobe) to prepare for your party-cum-interview-opportunity, two options are:
"2. How to gain friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie :
"Talk about networking while networking to network the network
"3. Business at the speed of thought by Bill Gates:
"Business business, business is to business what business."
The first one tickled me, but right on its heels I was brought up short by “I don’t know how to read that.” There were some other amusing bits: (Spoiler - click to show)the protag’s spider sense, continually misnaming the ex (once I realized it was not a typo), and especially one ending reveal about your host. The sum of these and other gags leaves little doubt that the protag is not going to be a model employee wherever they land. For all the successful gags, there were as many or more that elicited “I think I see what they were going for there” instead of a laugh.
It’s short, as far as I can tell at most 3 potential jobs you choose from, then done. While the selection of potential bosses was daffy, I felt they could be MORE widely disparate to really land the absurdism. A (Spoiler - click to show)sentient cactus and an urbane donkey felt somehow more similar than different to me? Maybe that’s just me?
All in all, I found I was working too hard through the language to find the humor. There were a lot of frenetic, goofy ideas on display, but more often than not they were undermined by the sentences they had to inhabit. It was thankfully short, a soul of brevity and all. But I appreciate it more when I don’t have to work so hard for my laughs.
Spice Girl: Baby Spice
Vibe: Playful
Polish: Rough
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! For sure spell and grammar checking are the next stops if I drive this bus. It would both sharpen the laughs and improve the polish in one fell swoop.
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.
1 of
1 people found the following review helpful:
Humor Over Cohesion, June 3, 2023It's quite absurd, really, and impossible to grasp hold of anything, but once you learn to let go of any expectation of grounding, it's good for some laughs, and fun to tinker around with the different options, just to see what's around the next corner. It seems a good length for this sort of experimentation.
- EJ, May 17, 2023
1 of
1 people found the following review helpful:
Short Twine job-hunting piece set at a party, May 16, 2023This is a short but entertaining Twine piece set at a party where through social interactions you need to try to get a job. It’s branching, and there are bad outcomes, and then others where you can get on better, and move the plot on. It is also possible to go back to previous choices, and try different routes. The writing is fun, though there are quite a lot of typos, including in the game blurb on the competition site. But that aside it’s briskly written, amusing, and I felt a sense of immersion within the story. And I was happy exploring different endings.
A goofy game about business networking, May 13, 2023This is a relatively brief Twine game with some silly/goofy humor in it. It seems like the main goal is just to get the reader to laugh, like when you can choose between wearing a suit or a cardboard box for your big debut.
'Aesthetics over plot' seems right, as there isn't much plot to talk about. You're out of work and are going to a networking event, and you just choose how to react to a few different things.
I'm not sure how to approach this review, so I'll use my five criteria scale:
-Polish: The game has some typos, and I think decapitalizes your name when you type it in.
+Descriptiveness: There are some clear textual images that are pretty funny, like your character shouting out their plans at the party.
+Emotional impact: There are definitely some funny parts.
+Interactivity: There are some significant differences on replay, even though it's a short game, and achievements are generously handed out.
-Would I play again? It was entertaining, but too slight to replay several times. I did replay once to see how much of a difference there was.
- Denk, April 23, 2023
- Jaded Pangolin, April 23, 2023
- Mr. Patient (Saint Paul, Minn.), April 16, 2023
- ronynn (Asia), April 16, 2023
- Edo, April 10, 2023
- Kastel, April 9, 2023
2 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
Play this., April 8, 2023This piece accomplishes exactly what the author set out to do. Readers shouldn't enter knowing much more than "silly" and "succinct." Two of the endings are disappointingly similar, but this one is definitely more about the ride than the destination.
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