Thanks Amanda! Great talking to you 
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The next game I write, I’m taking at least a year, not six weeks.
ETA: As a kindness to @AmandaB, maybe she’d prefer @HanonO split all this GJ stuff into a separate thread?
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Thanks, Hanon!
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Man, is that phrase I wish I had come up with. Not necessarily here, but in general.
This just blows my mind. You have a very distinctive, confident and compelling writing voice. How dare that come naturally to you, and not require decades of honing and refinement! :]
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I’ve had this issue with Google Forms previously, too, so it’s definitely something on my end! I’ve now made it to chapter 5 of the Kuolema, though, so I don’t think it’ll be an issue from now on 
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A Single Ouroboros Scale-- My Postmortem , by @Norbez
This is not a game, it’s a postmortem that you click through, and it dissects Bez’s game in last year’s Spring Thing, A Single Ouroboros Scale, which I was a tester for. But it’s also much more than that.
Anyone who is a fan of Bez’s work will know that he’s been struggling mightily for a few years, because he’s really open about the struggles he faces. The work is always a gateway into his mind and politics and the questions that inform his world; the artist and the art are intertwined in ways that show a remarkable willingness to share pain and connect it to the problems in the larger world.
Also, when I first came here, despite these ongoing struggles, Bez reached out to me and was very kind and supportive, and it’s always a trip to have an author whose work you have admired turn out to be a friendly and real person who is suddenly a part of your community.
The postmortem does the things a postmortem would, but it also takes us through a personal evolution that left me pumping my fist and cheering. Not just because Bez has tamed some wicked demons of self-doubt and depression through a terrible year of medical crisis, but also because this is a story that may offer a ray of hope to people with similar crises in their lives.
The terrible thing about wrapping your self-worth up in anything-- your work, another person, a public image, etc-- is that people can tell you that these things aren’t equivalent, but it won’t matter. You have to go through the fire yourself to truly understand and believe that your sense of your own worth is connected to those things only because that’s how you have decided to interact with the world. It’s not dependent on them. Only you can decide that you are a worthwhile person. And I’m just so delighted that Bez has come through that fire and seen that he and his art are valuable no matter what. That you can just shrug off people who don’t engage with your work the way you would wish them to and keep putting your vision out there because that’s how artists have to be, regardless of the punishments or rewards that come with doing so. Hats off to you, Bez, and thank you for sharing this moving and inspiring postmortem essay with us.
What bird is it? This is a super-specific bird that I encountered last week. A lesser goldfinch (lesser because it’s smaller, although this is sort of insulting taxonomy) somehow got inside of one of our bird feeders. It was frantic, beating itself against the windows of the feeder. So I opened it, and the little guy shot out, circled my head, and raced to a treetop, singing. The lesser goldfinch has a sunny lemon-colored belly and a big, open personality, and a lovely although slightly mournful and questioning song.
And here’s a lesser goldfinch video:
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This is a puzzly escape game with a timer. You can’t spend too much time figuring stuff out, or you’ll run out of time. The set-up is classic: you’re kidnapped and you have to escape. There’s a convoluted back story going WAAAAY back in the PC’s life, but it’s not fleshed out as well as it could be-- nonetheless, it’s an intriguing story and I loved where it was heading. I see from the author’s note on the Spring Thing page that this is both a more finished version of an IntroComp game, and a prequel to another game, which kept me from feeling miffed about the lack of closure here.
As a teaser for a coming game, it definitely piqued my interest and I will absolutely play Marie when it comes out (although I’ll play anything by Dee, so this is hardly breaking news). As a standalone game, it had some very successful moments and great momentum. I did have trouble with finding some of the correct commands, which ate into my time. Although the correct commands aren’t terribly difficult, I did have some awkwardness and lost time with unimplemented synonyms (climbing the axe in the wall and then getting off the wall were hard for me), and the timer means that it’s extra important that if you have the right idea, any reasonable command (like fall in water, or spit on cigarette while you’re tied up) should probably work. But there were only a few places like this, and most of it went smoothly for me.
The ending comes very abruptly, and since this is a snapshot of a larger to-be-released game, that’s OK, but I do wish there had been a little more explanation of why it ended like it did. I guess I’ll learn all when the full game comes out.
Overall, a short and fun escape room game which I recommend. Save often, or undo commands that don’t work, and you’ll have fun with this.
What bird is it? It’s a quelea, a small but plucky sparrow-like African bird. Here’s a quelea making a series of narrow escapes from a deadly foe:
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Thanks for your review Amanda! And I’d never heard of queleas, so I’ll have to look into those.
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The Withering Gaze of the Earth, by @worm
This is a short, trippy little story of monsters and gods and mothers, with a side dish of true love, in a save-the-world mission. It’s well-written and sets up a tragic story of an altered life and physique, and how children can become unwitting accomplices in parental madness.
The mood and tone are set very well, with fantastic descriptions of places and things that give you a sense of the difference, the wrongness, of the game world and the PC’s predicament. There’s a jarring disconnect between that writing and the tone of conversation with NPCs, which feels like it should be more hard-boiled or desperate, but instead is jovial and jokey. This bothered me at first, but in retrospect, I think it created some tension. I still would have liked to see the stakes of the mission, which are critical, be better reflected in the discussions the characters have.
The interactivity is fine-- there are no puzzles to solve and it’s a linear story, but you do have some choices. I only played through once, but I didn’t see many places that could have branched into a different storyline. Here, as in many twine games, some of the choices felt a little wonky. Most of your choices come from deciding what to say next, and some of those choices seem strange and unconnected to all the things the player would really like to know. Much is set up in this world-gone-wrong, a lot of invented terminology and lore, but none of it is ever explained, and when you finally meet the person who could wrap it all up for you, you don’t have the option to ask about any of it.
So there’s a sketch of a vividly realized world here, but many of the most interesting inventions are just there, with no back story or explanation for them. One of the hardest parts of building a world is teaching the reader about it without breaking the narrative, and the author simply skipped that part, which leaves a far leaner, meaner game, but one that feels unfinished, with an abrupt ending that left me feeling like I’d been an outside observer instead of identifying with the PC. All that sounds overly harsh, I think, because the writing really is engaging and the story is fresh and weird, flicking back and forth in time seamlessly. And the sketch of the nightmare world the author has built is intriguing-- I suppose if it wasn’t so intriguing, I wouldn’t feel cranky about not being more fully immersed in it.
So I definitely recommend you go play this weird little game; the author’s imagination is a very worthwhile place to spend 20 minutes.
What bird is it? It’s a cowbird, causing destruction and chaos by laying its eggs in the nests of other birds. The cowbird chicks outcompete the host chicks, and despite their wrongness, the host parent birds raise it. Cowbirds have contributed to the perilous conservation status of birds like the golden-cheeked warbler.
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Thanks for the review! The game not being as long as I wanted is also the place I felt like I had the most room for improvement.
I have heard of cowbirds, which is mostly from having played the board game Wingspan.
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This was the first game you reviewed, so your memory might be a bit foggy. Still, do you remember how you got the latch on the delivery guy’s cart open? I need to send the barrel rolling and him running after it so I can steal chocolate for Regomir’s brother. I already tried PECKing it, TAKEing it an DROPping it. None of those worked so I’m out of verbs.. (Tagging @groggydog too, or anyone else?)
So many times when I’m asking for hints, I wonder what this would sound like when overheard on a full train.
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Argh, um, hmm… Was there a rope to peck or something like that? I don’t remember it giving me any trouble, so it was intuitive to me, but I can’t remember the specifics.
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What worked for me was PECK LATCH, though there might be other synonyms implemented.
If you’ve already tried that, maybe you need to X BARREL first to establish the setup?
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I added three more of your reviews to the master spreadsheet this afternoon @AmandaB while I was adding more of mine. Meant I found you’d reviewed a game I just played today. Thank you for all the reviews you’ve done. I always enjoy reading the thoughts of fellow reviewers. Though I usually save this for after I’ve written my own review!
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Messaged Rovarsson privately 
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Thanks, Viv! I’ve been reading your reviews with great interest, too. There was some talk in @JoshGrams 's review thread about how differently people approach games, and that’s true. But it’s also amazing how often you see similar elements in so many reviews. I think they’re a great metric for players to determine what’s in their wheelhouse.
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I tried to play The Roads not Taken, but was unable to complete it. I just couldn’t ever find the correct commands to do anything. I could never examine anything, and sometimes I could type a cardinal direction to move things forward, but there was never any indication in the text that that direction was an option.
I got to the place where I could make a choice-- the guy says, “Choose”, but no verbs seemed to take me forward, so I quit.
The setup is great, the writing is vivid, and I was interested in the story-- I just couldn’t interact with it, and the hints weren’t helpful-- most of the things it suggested were unresponsive. I don’t want to wrestle an unfamiliar parser system without more guidance, so with apologies to @manonamora, I gave up.
I don’t feel comfortable assigning a bird to a game I couldn’t play to completion. If I get more direction for how to examine things or communicate or how to know what direction to go in, I’ll give it another shot and edit this.
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All good, Amanda 
I’m still glad you tried it nonetheless.
Any chance you downloaded your transcript? (typing transcript in the textbox)
It would help me see what wasn’t examinable (probably didn’t include enough verbs for those options - also just realised I didn’t include X for examine…).
I had tried to implement it in a way verbs were not always needed (like typing altar would trigger as if look altar had been indicated, or with the choice at the end indicating nothing or one of the branch on the list would have triggered an end), but that might have backfired 
.
I don’t know if you changed something the settings but all interact-able pieces can be bolded/coloured to make it more obvious. Otherwise look, take, talk, remember, are the most used verb.
As for cardinal directions, since the story is mainly linear, the direction is usually forward/north.
Also, thank you for the screenshot! I’ve fixed it on my end!
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Thanks for mentioning the cardinal directions—the first time I tried to play, I got stuck at the first place where you’re supposed to use one, because I had no idea it would be a useful thing to do.
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