Did I get the solution right? [rot13 SPOILERS]

Fgneg sebz gur yvtug checyr qhqr. Sbyybj gur cngu gb gur svefg ubhfr (yvtug checyr gb qnex checyr gb erq gb benatr), gura zbir gb gur pybhq ba gur yrsg (benatr gb erq).

Uvgpu n evqr ba n fabjsynxr (erq gb qnex checyr), naq trg bss bagb gur oebxra cngu ba gur obggbz yrsg (qnex checyr gb erq).

Zbir nyy gur jnl hc gur ehyrf naq bagb gur pybhq ng gur gbc (erq gur jubyr jnl guebhtu). Evqr n fabjsynxr ntnva gb gur arkg pybhq qbja (erq gb qnex checyr gb erq).

Sbyybj gur unatvat ebcr guvat gb gur pnfgyr (erq gb qnex checyr gb erq gb benatrr). Pyvzo gur pnfgyr gbjre naq bagb gur pbzrg (benatr gb yvtug benatr gb lryybj). Lbh ernpu gur lryybj fgne naq jva.

Is this the intended solution?

Bug: In the tutorial, at the “Select the Traders menu.” step, I accidentally clicked “Next” before selecting the traders menu. This soft-locked the game.

This is the author’s first text game. It’s a respectable effort, but clearly not comp-ready.

I suspect this is another victim of confusion between the typical itch.io jam format (where releasing whatever you have is the whole point) and the comp format (intended for fully complete and tested games). We should do something about this for next year, not sure what.

Writing

Could really have used some proofreading. In particular, all text is lowercase.

The adventurer is meant to be a blank slate rather than a fully developed character, but must be a “Mr” (not a “Ms” or “Mx”): why?

Story and characters

This is meant to be a monster-fighting game, so story is not the focus and NPCs are just for trading resources. However, it would have been nice to have some kind of reason why we’re adventuring, some goal to progress towards (perhaps defeating a bear?), and some ending.

Implementation

A bug makes the game unplayable: outside of the tutorial, it’s impossible to encounter monsters.

Artificial delays and fake loaders are annoying. I’d cut those completely.

Puzzles

Well, it’s not puzzle-based, so I’ll talk about the fight mechanics. The basics are there and could provide interesting tactical decisions if they were more fleshed out, but currently there isn’t enough depth for that.

Help & hints

I appreciated having access to the full list of commands at all times.

This is a bug: when napping in the forest, you should have a random chance of a fight or of encountering either trader, but due to a bug, the only possible random event is trader Jake.

Bug report: eat without an argument crashes the game.

A one-room puzzle comedy about unlikely superheroes.

Writing

Hilarious! The puns are true groaners.

Story

In itself, the story is a little thin: it’s the first mission where the Frenetic Five worked together. Their goal is to open a safe, and the safe doesn’t matter, only the paycheck. But it oozes with personality and wacky hijinks.

Characters

The main strength of the game. The Frenetic Five are all highly silly in different ways. I can just sit forever and watch them chatter.

Implementation

Pretty good overall. A few bugs can mislead the player, but nothing too serious. Light on the scenery, with well-chosen details.

Puzzles

IMO some of the puzzles are too hard and under-clued. Would really have benefited from some hints or a walkthrough.

When I figured out why the password is what it is, I groaned for a full minute.

Writing

I liked the contrast between the rather purple style and the very goofy events. Lots of typos, though.

Story and characters

There isn’t really an overarching plot, just a bunch of amusing misadventures the player character can have. There are very few decisions to make and little logical connection between choices and consequences. A good chuckle.

Implementation

The game is written in a custom engine that abandons many IF conventions such as abbreviated commands, lacks many verbs like “drop”, and says “undefined response” quite a lot. I found it clunky and unpleasant to use. It also doesn’t respect reduced motion, but that’s an easy fix, I’ll open a pull request.

Cute easter eggs: the door’s response to plugh/xyzzy, and the many responses to trying to have sex with various objects.

Puzzles

It’s fine to have a game where the player must make a decision with insufficient information and has little time to act. It’s not the fashion nowadays, but it’s a reasonable design choice. It’s however not fine to do so without any way to save.

An extremely rushed game with two very strong ideas. I would have preferred to wait another year or two for a fully-fleshed version, but I’m glad I played it.

Writing

A mixed bag. Much of the writing is sweet, melancholic, and touching; but much is clumsy, unedited, and typo-ridden.

Story

The basic story is very simple: the player character has sacrificed everything for a chance to travel back in time and say goodbye to their dead love, Anita. Most of the game is spent trying to find her, visiting locations she was fond of, and reminiscing about her. This is very well-told overall. The ending is extremely moving and the high point of the game, though its pacing is rushed.

Characters

There are three interesting characters: Anita, the PC, and the mysterious robotic guide who serves as a framing device for the text format. None of them are very developed, but what we do see is worthwhile.

The two NPCs, Ally and Tim, are clearly just information-delivery vehicles and should probably be cut entirely.

Implementation

The main mechanic is solidly implemented and I very much enjoyed it. It reminds me of The Impossible Bottle in the way that actions in one place have echoes in another.

Everything else is bare-bones. There’s no scenery anywhere in the game, even in extreme cases like a garage being described as having a car in it without any implementation of the car. Likewise, there’s no rationale for which objects should be taken and which should be time-warped.

Puzzles

Barely any, mostly just about moving objects between locations. NPCs or the narrator often outright state the solutions.

I did try leaving and I agree that locking the gate after the PC is a good design choice. But it doesn’t follow that the PC has a good reason to kill all the monsters. Sure, for their safety, they have to kill those that are free to roam, but some are safely stored and require quite a bit of work to summon.

October 31st is a puzzle adventure set in a house full of monsters. Overall, I enjoyed the game, but found its mechanical flaws frustrating.

Writing

Many of the descriptions are rather unclear: for example, I couldn’t tell whether the description of a door at the top of stairs had the door between me and the stairs, or the stairs in one direction and the door in another.

The game often attempts horror, but misses the mark: the writing gets overwrought, or tells me that something is scary rather than convey the actual feeling. That didn’t detract much from my enjoyment since it’s so heavily puzzle-oriented, except at the very last action, which IMO should be spread over a longer multi-command scene rather than delivered in one chunk.

Story and characters

Clearly not the focus: the game is meant to be an old-style puzzle romp. I’m very fond of those, so I don’t mind. The story is a thin pretext: the character came to the house for a bet and finds themselves trapped. The NPCs, whether friends or foes, are rather transparently mechanical and there to serve a puzzle.

In such a game, I’d expect the PC would be a blank cipher, and they mostly are, but a bit of personality comes through in their description: they think of themselves as handsome and kissable, with “piercing eyes” and a “chiseled jaw”. I expected a follow-up to that, and was looking forward to seeing the vain little jerk get taken down a peg, but apparently not. Also, they have no appreciation for good aged cheese.

Implementation

Serious guess-the-verb problems. For example, “dig” and “dig ground” and “hit ground” won’t do, only “break ground”. Likewise, “press fixed thing with portable thing” doesn’t work, only “press portable thing against fixed thing”.

The lack of implicit actions was infuriating. Why do I need to explicitly open every door every time? Why do I need to say “take leather book” and can’t refer to it any other way including by its title?

I’m told these are considered acceptable in the Adrift community, but I still don’t like them.

I did however appreciate that many small details are implemented, especially in the garden, where everything is gorgeously described.

Puzzles

The individual puzzles are fairly classic. My favourite was the kitchen one — still a classic, but a very different kind, followed by the one involving meat, which has an interesting twist in the mechanics (not sure if random or if I just couldn’t figure out the pattern).

They can be solved in any order except at the very beginning and end. However, my enjoyment was spoilt by guess-the-verb problems. Also, many puzzles don’t make sense for the character, who logically ought to leave well alone instead of inviting danger.

Help and hints

Very complete adaptive hints, and a helpful walkthrough. Having those definitely let me enjoy the game much more than I would have otherwise.

Hi Lazzah, I emailed you a transcript: if you solve the north console (PCC) before the south console (ESCC), you can’t progress any further. I’m on Mac, so it could be a Frankendrift-specific bug.

Holy shit.

Warnings

This is a very dark game, containing torture, murder, and sexual violence. Definitely not for children.

It also requires adopting a Christian mindset: the Christian views on the various themes that come up have power in-universe, so you must go along with them even if different from your own. If you’re constantly ranting about Christian hegemony, maybe skip this one.

Writing

Definitely conveys the mood and themes! Dark, haunting, relentless. The beginning felt a bit overwrought, but the rest of the game very quickly justified the tone, so it works.

A couple translation/tone errors.

Story

The story is inspired by the poem The Muse. It rather reminds me of a different poem.

The frame is apparently simple: You write, then your muse shows you inspiration for what to write next. The real bones of the story show up in the common thread between what she shows.

In no time at all, the game made me desperate to defy fate. At a few points I worried it was pulling that stupid trick where it forces me to do something then berates me for it, but not at all: the real intent goes much deeper.

After finishing Act 4, I was flailing in horror and trying to defy the muse, so I tried the solution to Act 4 again — not expecting a specific response, just to express rebellion. I was masterfully punished for this.

Characters

Extremely.

Implementation

Pretty solid. A few minor problems here and there, but nothing that impedes progress. However, since the game heavily encourages trying to break out of the fated path, I would have liked more implementation of off-path actions the player can try. In particular it makes sense for the PC to attempt suicide at several points, and there is no specific response for this.

Puzzles

Most of the puzzles are very simple, based on themes rather than reasoning. The final game-winning puzzle is an extreme example of this. I haven’t seen this done before, and I very much like it.

My only complaint is about Act 6: I liked having a more complex puzzle thrown in there, and it uses player vs character knowledge very pleasantly, but I found it under-clued and I don’t think the solution makes very much logical sense.

Use of media

Body-slammed me right from the start with beautiful art. Didn’t let up. WHAM.

Help and Hints

I didn’t use the hints during the game, but read them afterwards. They are complete and very well-structured. However, they make no attempt to explain the Christian ideas that permeate the game, so I’m not sure they’d be sufficient hinting for a player who’s unfamiliar with them — especially a player who is familiar with Jewish interpretations of the same concepts and therefore wouldn’t leap to the Christian ones. Not so bad when you can look up the words, but the last hint is less clear.

Can confirm it uses Monterey-only features and won’t run on older MacOS.

The Euripides Enigma is a science-fiction action adventure where you play a badass space marine. Overall, I found the game severely flawed, but it certainly delivers on the badass space marine action.

The author clearly has much love for the military setting, and I’d like to see a shorter game in a more realistic army/navy plot.

Writing

The descriptions are very sparse and utilitarian. That’s a perfectly defensible choice: it successfully shows a no-nonsense, mission-focused character, it’s reminiscent of the old style of games many of us are nostalgic for, and it keeps up the pace in a rather long game. But ultimately I think it’s the wrong choice for this game. If I’m on an alien planet, I hope to see exotic scenery and not just the parts of it relevant to the mission.

In some places, the narration dictates what the player character does (“so you order Lieutenant Zen to investigate”, “so you decide to ignore it for now”) or feels (“to your amazement”). I’m not sure why this choice was made, but it definitely pulled me out of the story.

Story

Definitely action-focused! You’re in space, there’s hidden dangers, strange happenings, futuristic weapons, heroic cliffhangers, nick-of-time action sequences.

I especially liked a rather somber moment around the middle of the game.

Characters

The full marine squad is introduced right from the beginning of the game, but the game doesn’t end up spending much time developing them, so they stay rather flat. The squad is also very top-heavy, with each character commanding exactly one other, which is quite odd. I think the squad could be reduced to a fire team of 2-3 privates plus the PC in command. On the other hand, it did prompt me to spend a night reading up on the USMC’s command structure, so that was a lot of fun.

The PC, presumably the subtitular(?) skipper Mike Erlin, has a very focused personality which successfully comes through very strongly. It’s not a personality I like, I resent how they won’t think about anything beside immediate necessity, but they certainly make sense as a person and are a good fit for the mission.

Implementation

This is by far the largest flaw of the game. I ran into a game-breaking bug early, restarted, and eventually turned to the walkthrough — which contains multiple errors ranging from minor (dropping an object not picked up yet) to outright blocking.

The game also completely lacks implicit actions. Where another game might simply write “You close the door behind you.” or have an NPC do it, this game refuses to let you move without closing the door, and will scold you for writing “close door” rather than “press button”. Searching a container, taking an object, and using it always take three separate commands. I realise that implicit actions make timed puzzles much harder to implement, and that realistic nitty-gritty heightens the pressure of a hostile environment, but come on, that’s just annoying.

I did however appreciate how lovingly the military equipment is implemented, including details of individual parts of objects.

Puzzles

The early puzzles are mostly unfair. One requires examining the walls of a room even though the other rooms have no description for walls, suggesting that the IF convention of ignoring walls applies. Another requires a specific noun rather than another that would logically make as much sense.

The later puzzles are much better. In particular I really liked the sequence where the PC finds different ways of exploring a cliffside.

A lovely, rhythmic idea, well expanded upon.

On my machine (Firefox on OSX), only mouse is registered, not keyboard.

Oh man, those flipping controls are nasty!

I agree with Feldo. This needs a tutorial level.

Won in 453s. That was hard!

The mechanics are original and pretty sweet. I think seeing a little more of the screen at a time would make planning more interesting, without harming the maze effect.

It’s possible to get trapped in the conveyor belt loops. Intentional?

A “relaxing, casual” game: that is, a game that made me scream “WILL YOU FALL INTO THAT GAP ALREADY YOU SON OF A BASTARD” for minutes on end.

I appreciated that a single playthrough is long enough to allow strategy, where the player builds zones of different colours.

Oh this is excellent! I love space games, and yet I don’t think I’d ever seen orbital decay as a theme before.

The mechanic is simple but tricky and learnable. The graphics are polished and legible. It’s fun to watch the planet go big kaboom.

My high score: 590.

Very cool mechanic! I’m impressed that you managed multiplayer.

Insert death sound here.

I hate and fear shapes, and yet I myself am a shape. This touches on age-old themes: an allegory of internalised prejudice, a meditation on going against oneself, a desire to draw a triangle with arms and legs because that’s funny.

The game is cleanly implemented. The jump mechanic is interesting and I hadn’t seen it before.

I thought “slow shape” meant a bonus that slows down the shape, not a shape that itself is slow.

Childish and colourful!

🌬️

Nice and polished, cool mechanics, many levels, good intro for each new mechanic. I liked the high-contrast colours.

I feel like it could lean harder on the puzzle aspect and less on the reaction time. Hazards help with this because you have to plan in advance.

It’s possible to get stuck in a hazard (with a constant annoying noise) instead of the level resetting. What causes this?

I like the basic mechanic of discovering which attack wins and timing the input.

However, I found it difficult to use. After I use an attack, other attacks don’t register for about a rotation or so, with no visual indication that they’re disabled — but very occasionally, I can block and then cast a blue orb immediately afterwards. I’m not sure if this is intentional and I don’t understand the mechanic, or if inputs are getting dropped by accident, or what.

Oh wow this is well made! Strong atmosphere, great graphics, great sound, scary endings.

The gameplay is deeper than it looks, too: there’s an incentive to flappy-bird slightly below the surface rather than let yourself sink, so you can emerge as soon as it’s safe.

I wish it accepted keypress as equivalent to clicking, to make it easier on the wrist.

I love the concept and the progressive level design! The difficulty seems well-balanced.

However, I can only play for a very short time, because the visual effects (distortion and chromatic aberration) are painful and the eye strain gets too bad after a minute or so. (I couldn’t play Cell Machine for the same reason.) How about adding an accessibility option to turn them off?

I couldn’t figure out the controls, even with a debugger. I notice that space restarts once I’m stuck all the way on the right, but nothing else seems to have any effect.

Hi, this won’t run on OSX (or any other BSD). They both use ELF executables, but the syscalls on Linux and BSD are different.

I tried building from source, but raylib.h is not present in the repo, it expects a hardcoded path.

Also, “hitting the the skeleton warrior’s weak spot”

I’m in a room in the mines with a lot of text. The description text overlaps the compass directions.

Happy to test the OS X version!

If your problem is related to Gatekeeper going “reee that’s not signed so it’s probably malware”, the only solution is paying Apple $100/year. At best you can give instructions on how to work around it.

You’re not publishing the non-Windows versions for comp judging?

This will be hard to rate: the game has a clear goal, it accomplishes it, it’s well-crafted, but I don’t like it. Since as of 2020-07-30T17:00:00.000Z no one has died and made me king of games, I can’t very well demand that the author write a game I like instead.

Here are however some suggestions that I think might improve the game for its true audience (as well as for me):

• The parser is very typo-intolerant; put chicken in po drops the chicken on the floor, where I need to pick it back up. Could it complain instead?
• Treat put [whatever] in stew the same as put [whatever] in pot (e.g. no need to pick it up from the table).
• Automatically try to take things I’m not holding before doing something with them, rather than complain I don’t have them.
• The boots are described, but they don’t exist when trying to take them.
• Thyme doesn’t taste very similar to mint at all, so it’s an odd substitute. My cook friends suggest that rosemary is the closest substitute that grows in the game’s climate, and that oregano would also be a good substitute and a very hardy plant.
• Let me give the rabbit entrails to the dog! It’s such a good boy and deserves a snack!
• Typo: “mdore”

The music is excellent: even though I was grumpy about the parser, I couldn’t help but smile when the emotive story’s music changed from sad to happy. I found the soap puzzle very amusing.

Review (no spoilers)

Oh what a masterpiece!

But the archetypical moment of a horror game is when you face that door, and you think “Opening this door is the worst thing I could do right now,” and then you type “OPEN DOOR”. As Bujold once said: “It will be simple and elegant, and you will do it to yourself.”

— Zarf, A Writer’s Guide to Interactive Fiction

Writing

mathbrush is a master of mood. The game opens with charming, merry scenes — which continue as cracks form and the joy turns to dread. The result is the most unsettling atmosphere I’ve ever seen. The night after finishing it, I did not sleep.

Is it an adorable romp, with multiple pettable animals, yummy cake, and spooky games that are perfectly safe pretend? Yes.

Is it a creepy, tense horror game, full of danger and loss and the desire for disaster to happen just to end the fear? Also yes.

Fuck’s sake, even the cake has an arc! Have you ever eaten a cake with plot before? Didn’t think so.

Favourite moments: The books in the study: I shuddered. Doffing the crown: I yelped.

Implementation

Rich and full of detail. I’m impressed with how the game manages complex scene changes in a large world where you can solve puzzles in any order. There’s a huge amount of NPCs, all with many unique responses.

I tend to get lost in large games, but not here: there’s a very clear tree structure with well-defined areas that make it easy to navigate.

Almost all my natural in-character reactions were implemented: I can thank helpful NPCs, cry, dance. My favourite moment was annoying an NPC and trying to apologise.

Puzzles

The puzzles are my favourite kind: easy (if you play a lot of IF, anyway) but complex, so that figuring them out feels like playing with an ornate puzzle box. I got several puzzles wrong on purpose just to see the different possible outcomes.

Most of the puzzles are very fresh and original, with a few twists on old classics like the maze. Personal favourite: the creaky house.

Recommendations

The only caveat is that I wouldn’t recommend it for a brand new player. The adaptive hints try to handle that case, but it can’t be very fun to be walked through everything. Otherwise recommended to anyone who likes parser IF at all.

I award this game the rank of Most Correct About Fondant.

Feedback for the author (with spoilers)

The character of the Mirrored Queen is ill-defined. Are the mirrors and the shared title hints that she’s me? Is she meant to be truly good, perfectly sincere when she claims to be my friend, and a deliberate challenge: “You thought all the wholesome cheer was a facade for horror? Shows what you know, I’m still right there!”? Is she meant to be ambiguous, maybe a genuine force for good, maybe a player in a game where my family are pawns and just as sinister as her sister? Any of those could work, but I didn’t get a sense that the game was committing to any. As it stands, she’s more of a vague foil for the Empress.

It’s important to the plot that the pig is smaller and thinner than an adult human. But “a regular pig” is much girthier than a man. It would be better to describe it as a miniature pig and give an idea of its size.

Consider implementing “laugh”. It’s the only natural reaction I had that wasn’t implemented, and it’d complement “cry”.

Bugs

Mechanical

whistle = blow whistle

“whistle” is a synonym for “blow whistle” for the whole game, except at the very end.

Dazzling not properly reset

> summon
The dragon comes closer to you, lured by your call. It roars out a challenge!

> shine
You raise the sun orb high. It releases a brilliant light, dazzling the dragon. That was bright; it will be effective for quite a while.

> d
[…] The dazzled eyes of the dragon return to normal. […]

> u
[…]

> summon
The dragon comes closer to you, lured by your call. It roars out a challenge!

> shine
You raise the sun orb high. It releases a brilliant light, dazzling the dragon. That was bright; it will be effective for quite a while.

The dragon shakes its head, roaring. It is no longer dazzled by the sun orb.

Family scene transitions

I got the ring first, then the sceptre. Both times, the message was

For a moment, you think you can hear your brother David calling out, but then everything is quiet.

and I never got the message about Alice. Possibly relevant: I hadn’t seen Alice at that point.

Responses

Inappropriate responses

1. Talking to inanimate object produces “You can’t see anything by that name.”
2. Looking in the gift shop after the transformation produces “The golden-haired werewolf, who happens to be a werewolf, is looking around, bored.”
3. When examining the unsolved pot, the description of the solved pot is shown instead.

Unimplemented objects

• the astroturf and backdrop in the Duelling Garden
• Doña Villar’s dress
• the wall in the Queen’s Garden
• tears on the weapons
• crater in the crater

Missing pronoun reset

Pronouns should be reset from the lever after inserting it:

> put lever in hole
(the plastic beam in the hydraulics lever)
You slide the hydraulics lever into the hole. It fits perfectly! Now everything should work just fine.

> push it
You can’t see ‘it’ (nothing) at the moment.

Bad pluralisation

> talk to countesses
The countesses ignores you.

> talk to vicomtes
The vicomtes ignores you.

Extra article

> give sausage to toby
The Toby turns up its nose at the limp bratwurst.

Whitepace & punctuation

Inconsistent line breaks in AMUSING list

…XYZZY? …asking the employees about each other? …hitting, pushing, pulling, throwing something at, turning, burning, tying or cutting people?
…getting the moon open in Midnight. Laserfight?

Missing/extra periods at end of descriptions

Missing period when a duelling team isn’t wearing anything:

> x countess
These masked and dangerous women wear outrageous gowns. They are carrying some red laserpistols

Missing period after solving the pot:

> x pot
Little platinum remains. The pot has served its purpose

Extra period after Mom drops the list:

> x list
Mom’s handwriting is unfortunately impossible to read. Where did she go?.

Extra spaces

• Eugene has trouble keeping his footing, but so do you .
• Eugene has trouble keeping his footing, but your slippers keep you firmly grounded .
• holds a sign that says
• the castle falls, sending

Typos

• He walks way (“away” is more standard)
• It says, “This way to the Creaky House. (unclosed quote)
• nephw
• This is the almost the end.
• embarassed
• That to the north is a garden (can’t see “that to” making sense, I assume typo)
• Midnight. Laserfight

A cute, simple, extremely tiny game — really, a birthday card in game form. I like that verbs natural to the situation (kiss, hug, play, rub) are implemented.

Typo: “whicih was fun”