Four Days of Summer

Four Days of Summer is a funny little game. I'm glad David Welbourn wrote it and sorry I missed it earlier. It's not very big, and it has loads of meta-humor and hat-tips to other games, including Humbug by Graham Cluley, which I hadn't heard of yet. Humbug's a big enough game that this isn't really a spoiler. And it's very consistent that David's game would hat-tip other games, what with all the maps and walkthroughs he's written.

The first part whisks you through some surreal places where you just have to figure one semi-obvious thing. It's kind of hard to mess up, though there are some old reliable gags in there.

Your friend, David, is about as fourth-wallish as a narrator can get, as he provides you with weird items he inexplicably finds. They wind up being useful. It's all tied together with a potato peeler you find at the end. No, really!

I admit I was slightly misled by the cover, which left me scrambling and looking for a green item I didn't need. It is available, but it's a bit of an easter egg. (Also, I was hoping for some partial solutions with the flags. You could make (Spoiler - click to show)Canada's flag or, with the green, (Spoiler - click to show)Mexico's flag. But hey, it's Speed-IF!

And for Speed-IF it's extremely tidy and fulfilling and holds out the promise of a very interesting mechanic worth developing, whether in FDoS's world or, perhaps, another author's completely different one. If you're an author looking for an idea, once you see the idea, you'll realize there must certainly be many ways to riff on it or extend it.