Us Too by Andrew Schultz
I first played one of Andrew’s homophone games for last year’s Comp. The fundamental premise is the story gives you a two-word clue which you then transmute to a two-word homophone to advance the story in unexpected and often surreal ways. For example, Why Pout?, the title of last year’s game, becomes WIPE OUT.
I looked at my review of Why Pout? from last year, and most of the overall observations hold here. These games offer a very specific flavor of puzzle-solving, and it may be an acquired taste. Ultimately, I think one either likes this sort of thing or doesn’t, and that’s about it. I like it.
The plot of Us Too is reasonable enough—our eccentric aunt has left us a mine in her will, and we will inherit it if we can complete a bunch of fetch quests that her lawyers will oversee. The mine serves as a sufficiently fun place to explore, acknowledging that the point of these games is not really to develop a deep narrative but rather ask the player to conquer a gauntlet of wordplay.
So, what makes Us Too different from Andrew’s last game? For weaker areas, the whole introductory sequence stands out as potentially impenetrable. The game sometimes gives all four words of a homophone pair, and taken as a phrase, those four words don’t always make sense or distort language in odd ways. The first “solution,” which is narrated to us, doesn’t fully use the mechanic we’ll need. Our aunt’s name is Aunt Rickie-Anne, for which the narration suggests the solution is “tricky” (Aunt Rickie → Anne Tricky). But single-word solutions are never used while playing. The first solution we need to provide is responding to “House O’” (HOW SO), which is maybe the grammatically weakest puzzle in the game. Finally things start moving forward meaningfully when we arrive at the mine and riff off our nickname.
Upon arrival, though, we are presented with some bewildering things in our inventory: an Aw-Lug-All-Ugh, an A’ight, Amusing Item Using, and an Urgh-Ought-'Er Jot. These translate to the player’s carryall, the list of things we need to gather, and a note about how to get started. The game does try to explain their usage via narrative. But seeing the contractions and somewhat tortured language of our inventory might be enough to convince new players to turn away.
My other concern is there are some puzzles which seem to violate the fundamental conceit of using a two-word phrase to advance. One puzzle is solved by transmuting an item on the list you carry, which seemed out of scope to me. There’s a navigation challenge that’s fine enough on its own but doesn’t belong—to solve it, you need to manipulate a certain object, whereas for everything else in the game, objects are manipulated for you. And the puzzle on which I struggled the most was the cartoon in the diner, which asks you to identify both the initial phrase and the homophone phrase, a marked increase in difficulty over anything else.
However, the affordances the game gives feel much stronger. There is a helpful THINK command that records when you’ve made a correct guess (or even half of a correct guess) about something that doesn’t work quite yet. There are a lot of passages in the overworld (ultimately expanding in all eight directions of the standard parser-approved compass), but the game is very clear about where you can go, and, more importantly, where you shouldn’t go because you have completed everything in a given area. This aspect of the game is managed very carefully by the narrative, and it saves a lot of frustration and fruitless wandering around.
Further, the game gives you an eye that serves as a hint device, and an item in your inventory that will simply let you skip a puzzle. Early on, there are multiple puzzles available at once, but towards the mid and late game, you need to solve them one at a time to advance. These aids can help prevent a player from giving up entirely, and the game never scolds you for using them.
The best thing about Us Too is when the puzzle solutions simply flow from one to the next. It’s supremely satisfying to quickly rattle off four or five successful commands in a row while the entire realm surreally changes around you. In order to make the mechanic work, a lot of the translations are nonsensical (in the Scribe Room, for example, you must SCRY BROOM, even though there’s no real reason to expect there’s a broom there), but the best puzzles have both narrative and linguistic meaning. For instance, how would you reach a high cup? Why, you’d have to HIKE UP. Many room descriptions have hints about the general meaning of the phrase you’re supposed to enter, and there are even some funny responses when you enter a possible answer that is incorrect. (My favorite is at the beginning, when trying to dealing with the lucent row. I tried to LOOSEN TROU—as in, drop my pants—and the game clutched its metaphorical pearls.)
I typically prefer IF that offers meaningful stories and easy puzzles that don’t get in the way of experiencing the narrative. Us Too offers completely different pleasures, and it’s a testament to the game’s strengths that I enjoyed it as much as I did. I’ve played three of Andrew’s other recent Comp games, and I feel this one is the strongest. Go ahead, inhabit the role of “Trike” West. Go ahead, TRY QUEST.