Brad's IFComp 2024 Impressions

Competitions IFComp
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I’m so happy to be playing IFComp games again! (My past years: 2021, 2022, 2023) What to expect:

All of my reviews are spoilery. I always want to know what people really thought and read reviews after I’ve played a story, so that’s what I write.

Personal bias ahead. I’m writing and scoring based on what I want out of IF, which I recognize is not universal. Things I look for, in no particular order

Things I look for, in no particular order
  • Are the interactions fun and/or consonant?
  • Does it try something new (mechanically, narratively or thematically)? Or perhaps: Is this work aware of its place within the medium?
  • Does it include quality-of-life features appropriate to its form and scale?
  • Does it have a well-sketched setting?
  • Is the plot compelling?
  • Did I find the characters memorable?
  • Does the prose serve it well?
  • Do I like this?
  • Do I admire it?
  • Did it give me something to think about?
  • (Negative) Does it have enough bugs, typos, or other issues to distract from the experience?

I’m cherry-picking this year. Life intrudes, so I’m jumping straight to entries that look interesting and skipping ones that probably aren’t for me (especially anything horror-themed or with lots of content warnings.)

I also want to caveat that I’m feeling less patient than usual this year with high-friction experiences. I’m going to share raw impressions because as an author I’d want to know when someone bounced off my work. There are probably entries I’d have found more rewarding if I had the energy to push through a rough start, but there’s just too much to see and too little time this go-round. I want to acknowledge my responsibility in that up front and hope there’s no personal offense given.

Let’s review some IF!

13 Likes
2

The Lost Artist: Prologue

Alejandro Ruiz del Sol
Co-written by: Martina Oyhenard
Played 2024-09-02

A prologue with prose issues, teetering on the border of captivating-surreal and tired-surreal.

Spoilery thoughts

I thought this contained some great raw material that unfortunately didn’t hang together. Its framing as the introduction for a larger game leaves it light on both plot and interactions. And on its own terms, as a prologue, it didn’t successfully place a hook. If I’ve understood it correctly, the plot so far is “Leben has hired Balding to find her lost inspiration.” We weren’t left with a clue or a crisis making me want to return and see what happens next.

I think the surrealism itself is supposed to be the hook, and this could work if the world-building held together a bit better. There are some great details in here - phrases like “threatening ink,” a raven in a sort of trickster-god role, the traditional drink in a gourd - but it’s not yet formed for me a larger sense of “what’s the weird thing about this world?” that I’d want to see the author explore. Then other bits, like this one, seem to shift from “surreal with purpose” into a “lulz random” mode that feels like early internet humor:

Better to find something perfectly imperfect to focus on. Balding grabs a close-by pile-of-unshucked-corn.
It has the juice!

It doesn’t help that we don’t have a point-of-view character helping us react to the world. All of the characters take the surrealism in stride, so we’re on our own interpreting it. And so I found myself objecting, unfairly, to all sorts of phrases and images here. A few more examples:

K had a nail gun; she didn’t believe in guns.

Hold up - a nail gun, as a weapon, is also wildly dangerous. Someone opposed to gun violence but chooses to wield a nailgun as weapon is probably a very violent character.

Her task: write business documents using the approved fonts and margins, and stuff them in preaddressed envelopes.

As someone who writes documents for a living, this really misunderstands the nature of an administrative job.

RMG saves money by making up a new logo every time.

How does this work? Coming up with new logos is expensive!

I might have given all that the benefit of the doubt if the prose wasn’t getting in the way with internal inconsistencies, noun soup and unwieldy sentences.

  • Early on we’re told a “job was sort of spur-of-the-moment,” and a few sentences later it’s described as a “perfectly timed bank heist.”
  • I’m not sure what effect this epic hyphenation is supposed to create:

Out on the Lighthouse Island Business Complex she works at, in her once-a-meeting-room-but-now-a-group-of-cubicals-surrounded-by-glass, The Artist Formerly Known as Leben writes her important business documents, with no flair, no artistic drama.

  • At one point a character is writing with a pen, and then suddenly with software.
  • There’s tense confusion.
  • “Manila folder” is misspelled.
  • The detective examines his own hair in an office that doesn’t obviously have any reflective surfaces, then “deduces the letter is by an antagonist from a different story prologue.” What? How did he deduce this?
  • I’m not sure whether “Balding always loves cracking open a new case” is a clever misuse of “cracking the case” or simply misunderstands it.

All told there are mysteries here and I’m curious what a more polished and complete version of this would look like, but I found the prologue frustrating.

6 Likes
3

Doctor Who and the Dalek Super-Brain

jkj yuio
Played 2024-09-02

A visual novel that needs an undo button.

Spoilery thoughts

I’m not much of a Doctor Who fan - I’ve enjoyed a few of the newer seasons, but not the stuff that’s probably referenced here. That said, I have a rough sense of what’s on-brand, and this really did feel like a campy and formula Doctor Who episode to me, with a companion in peril, a moment of surrender, handwavy tech, escalating stakes, some reference to Time-Lordness and a “talk your way out of it” climax. So full marks for overall structure, this is nicely done.

I didn’t enjoy the moment-to-moment play as much. It was a little hit-and-miss on the fantasy of being the Doctor: Some of the forced choices with the Daleks were very on-brand, but the trial-and-error puzzle with the sonic screwdriver accessories was a bit dull and out-of-place - I thought the Doctor would know his gadgets and not have to guess. There are also no-warning deaths that reset back to the start of the game, with no undo feature that I could find.

The prose is all serviceable and doesn’t get in the way, but I didn’t find the characters especially memorable - which also might be on-brand? There were some non-blocking bugs with repeated dialogue. And the graphics and sound are very front-and-center with this piece - they’re pretty good, and also not what I personally want out of the comp so I’m kind of ignoring them.

Overall I didn’t find it thrilling but fairly well-built and besides the death-resets and smooth experience.

8 Likes
4

Welcome to the Universe

Colton Olds
Played 2024-09-02

A challenging reflection that maybe plays with the box a little too much.

Spoilery thoughts

A reflection on agency and human nature framed on the work of the fictional Dr. Jacob Balamer, author of The Necessities of Function, a controversial theory of meaning. We jump back and forth between a treatise on Balamer’s work, and the work itself, a game designed to drive home his theories about what people have in common and how we choose to respond to it. That theory seems to suggest that our common experiences are under-studied and make us all more predictable than we believe.

Both voices are quite convincing at first, with the academic work in a dry, critical style and the game-within-a-game earnest to create moments of reflection and observe the human condition. Some of the writing is quite good. The game muses:

Somehow you’ve grown older, dumber, and wiser in equal measure.

…which is a great succinct take on an experience I have but rarely hear spoken. It was clear early on that I was looking at a broad and ambitious work worthy of critical thought.

Later on, this work “plays with the box” so to speak, and I didn’t find this as effective, perhaps missing what it was trying to accomplish. This includes a survey that seemed too self-satisfied for thwarting my attempts to avoid taking it, and a faux-update that must be slowly “downloaded” with a typically frustrating progress bar. Was the slowness necessary to the narrative beat here? It all leads to a sort of repentance by Balamer, a rewriting of his own theory by literally rewriting the ending of the game in front of you, in a way that acknowledges your earlier, individual choices instead of (I presume) making a point about how little those choices matter. I didn’t quite understand the motivation for this repentence, and if anything it’s a little ironic that the rewritten conclusion acknowledging the consequence of our choices still fits the famliar-if-effective pattern of templating the player’s performative choices into what is still a quite linear expeirence. Now I’m not sure what my takeaway is. I have a vague sense that the auctor ex machina of the ending feels a little too tidy for the earlier ambition of the work, but I also haven’t gone back through it two or three times trying to do a closer critical read.

I found myself comparing this unfavorably to Repeat the Ending (2023), which employs a more varied chorus of academic and critical voices commenting on the central game, and also wrestles in its own way with questions of agency. I wonder if even a second academic voice in this piece would have helped draw into focus which parts of Balamer’s work we were meant to question, or perhaps the pressures that eventually inspire his change of heart.

For all I struggled with this piece, it blew past my usual checklist of concerns and right into thought-provoking and challenging territory. (By the way I love the presentation, a thoroughly non-default aesthetic that makes it clear which voice is speaking at any moment, while still centering the text and not interfering with the readability of the work.) It’s getting a good score from me, I’m always looking for more like this.

10 Likes
5

Thanks for the review. There’s an undo button top right. The tutorial mentions undo, but doesn’t say there’s an actual button. Thanks for the tip, I’ll improve the tutorial.

5 Likes
6

Oh wow! I totally missed that undo button, that’s on me, and - sorry - I skipped the tutorial. I skip most tutorials, given the option, unless it’s specifically recommended as in “If it’s your first time playing this game, please read the tutorial” or “There are unique mechanics in this game. See the tutorial for details.”

5 Likes
7

Not a problem at all. I’m really glad you played it and wrote a review. You’ve done me a favour as the little icons on the top right weren’t properly mentioned and they should have been covered in the tutorial. Thanks.

5 Likes
8

Focal Shift

Fred Snyder
Played 2024-09-03

Have fun hacking very bad security.

Spoilery thoughts

I quite enjoyed this! A break-into-the-server thriller with twists and turns, handwavy cyberpunk tech, and light puzzles.

Let’s talk about the recurring hacking-themed password puzzle. It gives feedback on your guesses with + and - symbols, and for me (and probably a lot of people) this immediately summons Wordle or Mastermind. But on my second attempt at the first such puzzle I figured out that they tell you which direction to proceed in the alphabet. “Solving” this gimmick was a genuine moment of pleasure, and I do think it’s a clever misdirect.

I think it could have been a bit stronger though, in a few ways.

  • For one thing, guesses don’t have to be valid words (even though solutions are) so once you’ve got the gimmick a near-optimal approach is a per-letter binary search. I ended up starting every puzzle with “mmmmmm” or its equivalent and so solving got very mechanical to the point of being busywork. Limiting guesses to valid words would force me to engage with a nonuniform terrain, making the puzzle more challenging but also more interesting to repeat.
  • On that note, the puzzle repeats a few times but even with a different password, once you’ve got the gimmick it’s not really a new challenge. It’d be neat to have more of a new wrinkle each time it appeared (untested ideas: Vigenere-like variant where the alphabet wraps in a different place per-character; an n-grams variant with a longer password; revealing more password to solve as you go, producing time pressure). Or perhaps a Hadean Lands-like trick would be thematically appropriate here - once you’ve solved the first puzzle you’ve created a tool that automates solving this type of puzzle, and subsequent puzzles wrap or compose the password puzzle in some way. (Not that this is easy to build!)
  • I found it comical that this “blockchain” company - a tech interested in what are essentially very difficult passwords - has such a laughably hackable password security system. If anything it’s the “blockchain” mention, not the password system, that’s out of place in this cyberpunk/80s hacker movie story. This clash might be more glaring to me because I work in software, but also I feel like most people would say “just don’t have a password hint system.” It’d preserve the fantasy a little better to reframe what’s happening a tiny bit - if you told me the hints are coming from my own kit helping me crack the database encryption key I’d totally accept the handwave.

A later hacking puzzle channels hunt-the-wumpus a bit, which I found charming but not necessarily more interesting or a natural extension of the earlier puzzle.

I also thought the number of things to hack in the environment, and the separate identify and hack verbs, were very effective at creating the fantasy here. It started to create that same sense of depth in the world that Metriod Prime’s scanner and visors do. That feeling that a whole other layer of reality is hidden in the world model is extremely cyberpunk, and while this isn’t an extraordinarily deep or simulationist take on the idea, it was just enough to create the desired effect. Nice work!

7 Likes
9

Bureau of Strange Happenings

Phil Riley
Played 2024-09-04

Weird science adventures!

Spoilery thoughts

This is dense and creative and well-implemented. I find it funny and I’m a fan of the genre it’s going for, a sort of X-Files comedy. This should tick all the boxes for me. And yet I found it sort of frustrating, and maybe hit a bad edge case? I didn’t end up finishing it.

In particular, I struggled with the sizable middle section of the game, even consulting the extensive hint system and walkthrough. As far as I understand it I’d gathered all the necessary items and put them in the frame, but tapping it gave me a default “Violence isn’t the answer to this one” response. I couldn’t sort out what I was doing wrong and ran out the comp clock.

The whole thing is genuinely impressive and I liked a lot of it, but just had a hard time with it. I expect it went better for many people and expect it to do very well in the comp this year.

4 Likes
10

A Very Strong Gland

Arthur DiBianca
Played 2024-09-04

Indeed requires a very strong gland.

Spoilery thoughts

I need to go back to this one. After hitting a rough spot with BOSH I was not braced for a very difficult puzzle game, and I bounced off this pretty hard. I’ve loved some of DiBianca’s past work and suspect I’d enjoy this too in the right moment.

The hook here - besides the unique input scheme, which I quite like - is that you’re in an alien place full of aliens and alien tech, and so nothing is clear or obvious - neither what the aliens say to you, what objects are, what controls do, etc. Everything is sort of bland and sterile, and you work out every little thing through trial and error and gradually build up a vocabulary and mental model allowing you to proceed through the world.

A satisfying intellectual challenge, to be sure! But one I’ve got to be in the mood for, and unfortunately this caught me on an off day. I found myself switching into a sort of degenerate adventure game “try every thing on every thing” mode pretty quick, and since the game opens up and gives you a lot of locks and keys early (and you probably won’t recognize them as such) that meant progress was quite slow.

All that to say, go read other reviews, I think I didn’t give this its best shot. I might go back to it post-comp.

3 Likes
11

A Warm Reception

Joshua Hetzel
Played 2024-09-14

A treasure hunt.

Spoilery thoughts

The opening paragraph of this game says, emphasis mine:

Figured you’d take some pictures of the castle, get some dirt on the guests and be done.

I was disappointed to discover I wasn’t carrying a camera - or a non-default description, for that matter.

> x me
As good-looking as ever.

> i
You are carrying nothing.

It turns out this opening premise hasn’t got much to do with the game - not much reporting or photography takes place. However! What does happen - some light puzzling on a modest treasure hunt around a silly castle - is nicely done. I had a good time!

If the implementation is a bit spare in places, it didn’t interfere and even made for an easier experience. I found a couple of the puzzles particularly satisfying:

  • The dark space I could only pass through by putting out my light was well-clued but still felt like a nice bit of lateral thinking.
  • Locating the armored dress was obvious once I found the moths but I genuinely had no idea what the key would be before then, so it was a nice surprise.

The die-roll ending is kind of a neat take on letting the player decide whether they’re satisfied with their own performance. Depending on the story, going as far as making it possible to win with no points, or lose with all points, might not feel great - but for the playfulness of this piece I think it works. I did wish for a tiny bit of epilogue though.

4 Likes
12

Breakfast in the Dolomites

Roberto Ceccarelli
Played 2024-09-21

A comedy of parser errors.

Spoilery thoughts

Gonna put my experience out front here so you can stop reading if you want.

  • I think I see what this is trying to do.
  • I don’t think it works.
  • I believe I hit a game-breaking bug.

What I think the game is trying to do is to turn moments that are traditionally frustrating in parser games, like inventory limits and disambiguation, into moments of interactive comedy.

I think for “simulated frustrating” play to work, we need to have confidence that we’re in good hands. Unfortunately there are some design choices here and some actual bugs that undermined that confidence for me, causing the experience to tip over into “real frustrating.”

The first breach of trust was the sexist cliche set up in my character’s description.

> x me
[…] In love with your girlfriend, very beautiful, but also shrewish when something doesn’t go her way. […]

This is setting up the core conceit of the game - Monica is the center of our world, and the driving force behind the tasks we perform. But Violet set a better example over 15 years ago.

Then the little implementation problems begin, with what appear to be timed events not taking my actions into account.

> talk to receptionist
“Good evening, we are Francesco and Monica and we have a reservation.”
“Just a moment, I look for it.” - the receptionist states and types something on the computer.

“Good evening, welcome to our hotel!” - the receptionist greets you.

Now a bit of comedy. I’ve found the wallet and now need to show my ID to the receptionist.

> take identity card
You’re carrying too many things already.

This probably comes down to taste. Since the “held items” limit persists throughout the game, I kind of wish this message didn’t look so “default.” You could preserve the frustration of it while still providing some ease-of-use consideration, by mentioning the currently held items in this message. Or heck - “Your hands are already full” would be a more accurate error message, because technically I’d be “carrying” the same number of things before and after removing the ID card from the wallet.

I also think there’s a differently funny, but less frustrating, take on this idea: What if taking when my hands are full succeeds, but my clumsy character drops something else on the floor? At reception Mo can roll her eyes at me and make sure I pick up all my things before we go upstairs, but at least I can hand over my ID card faster. And later at breakfast, the stakes are higher - I could break plates or spill drinks! - so I’m incentivized to be more careful having learned a bit about my limitations.

But I stuck with it into the breakfast, starting to “get” the joke of the thing. I wasn’t totally sure if unclear dialogue systems are another trope being lampooned here?

“May I serve you a hot beverage?” — the waiter asks, then explains: — “I can offer you a coffee, a cappuccino, a hot chocolate or a tea.”
> order tea
“Don’t change the topic.” — Monica says you.

Then things started getting genuinely broken.

> talk to monica
You say hello to Monica.
You have nothing specific in mind to discuss with Monica just now.
*** Run-time problem P47 (at paragraph 1 in the source text): Phrase applied to an incompatible kind of value.
leaves.

I got into a state where I still had a crepe to eat, but wasn’t allowed to interact with it because it had somehow been flagged as “owned” by Monica even though I was holding it. (Confirmed with showme) so I couldn’t make the story proceed. Once I was convinced this was a bug I even tried to purloin the crepe but this didn’t change its ownership, and somehow put Monica in my inventory.

> i
You’re holding a crêpe and a dish, and you have yourself and Monica on the bench. You also have a wallet in the right back pocket, and you have a room key in the right front pocket.

And yes, I did look for hints. Besides being a little condescending, the last line also seemed to be simply wrong (emphasis mine):

> hint
I am sorry to hear you are stuck.
It is not my job to help the player, but I can give you some advice.
First of all look carefully at anything around; be nice to people you meet, such as saying hello; next, pay attention to everything Monica says and does.
The receptionist can tell you something of interest.

> talk to receptionist
You say hello to the receptionist.
You have nothing specific in mind to discuss with receptionist just now.

So the whole thing fell extremely flat in my case. I’m happy to see other reviewers had a better time with it.

8 Likes
13

Hebe

Marina Diagourta
Played 2024-09-21

An epic with unusual rough edges

Spoilery thoughts

I was genuinely excited once I saw the ambition and structure of this one, and so extra disappointed to hit my second game-breaking bug of the evening.

I’d managed to do a little exploring, made some progress on the key puzzle in Thebes but was feeling stuck so I decided to go try something else. I head from Kadmea back to the Agora of Thebes, and then:

Agora of Thebes
The Agora of Thebes, is a bustling marketplace and social center. It is a hub of activity, where citizens gather to trade, discuss politics, and engage in religious ceremonies.

Unlike the Agora of Athens, which is dominated by the Doric architectural style, the Agora of Thebes is showcasing a more diverse range of styles. While some buildings feature Doric columns, others incorporate Ionic or Corinthian elements.

Known adjacent locations:
→Kadmea (U)
→Gates of Thebes (S)

> s
You can’t go that way.

Uh-oh.

> gates
That’s not a verb I recognise.

> go south
You can’t go that way.

> exits
That’s not a verb I recognise.

> w
You can’t go that way.

> e
You can’t go that way.

> n
You can’t go that way.

Seems I’m trapped in this corner of the map, and am quitting at 0/243 points. :sweat:

But look, I really was interested in what this promised. Zipping around ancient Greece at mythic speed, saving the pantheon by solving cryptic puzzles in places of significance with some tourist appeal… this sounds great.

As for what I did manage to play:

This would benefit from a bit more of an in medias res opening - there’s a lot of text that doesn’t establish a goal, then a few empty turns, then the inciting incident happens and then we wake up and get more exposition and are finally set loose. Collapse that all into the moment we wake up!

There’s a typo in that early scene - I believe this should say “Heracles’ club:”

You grab Heracle’s club out of his hands and leap towards Kronos.

I went to Athens first, found the torch puzzle but found the cryptograms challenging enough that they might be “fake” and require progress elsewhere. So I headed to Thebes where I got as far as finding the labeled weights and trying several sequences on the scale-lock. Maybe my brain just wasn’t working, but this seemed like an underspecified puzzle. The riddle is “From the lightest touch to the heaviest step” and the weights are labeled (Sword, Spear, Shield, Snake, Owl, Horse). So here I am searching online trying to figure out which is heaviest, an owl , a spear, or a sword, and discovering that there isn’t really an answer to that question because these objects vary and their typical weight ranges overlap significantly. So either I’m down to guessing, or the riddle is referring to something entirely besides weight. I don’t know what. Odds of inciting violence? Levenshtein distance? No hint system and no walkthrough that I can find, hence I decided to try something else and hit the navigation bug that ended my run.

The whole thing feels brimming with promise and badly in need of playtesting. I hope it gets fixed up so I can see the rest!

5 Likes
14

Where Nothing Is Ever Named

Viktor Sobol
Played 2024-09-25

Certainly something.

Spoilery thoughts - no really, this one spoils easy

One small puzzle, toying with the idea of not knowing the names of things. I like little experiments like this. I have one! Although mine unfairly gates its ending behind a guessed nonstandard action. Viktor’s work here is more fair, and doesn’t suffer from my poor poetry.

The timed cat reveal was nicely done, though in the moment I wasn’t sure what this information would unlock for me. I suppose it would be an important clue that the other thing could also be an animal, though I’d worked that out a turn earlier in my run.

And then, I landed on a critical discovery quite by mistake.

> sit
(on the other thing)
You get onto the other thing.

Oops! I definitely intended to sit on the ground and see if either thing reacted. The auto-correction is probably fine - might even be by design? - though in general I think implementation of mounting and dismounting the horse could be just a little more robust to help the player through the last step.

> take something
It’s difficult to do while sitting on the other thing.

> up
You can’t fly.

> off
Unintelligible.

> get up
You climb down.

I also tried this specifically was hoping it would spur the other thing to move while I was sitting atop it. The response is fair though.

> kick other thing
You can’t bring yourself to hurt it.

I think I forgot that going a direction on a “rideable” thing is a normal interaction, I figured I’d have to convince the thing to go rather than going that way myself while riding it.

Altogether a tidy little puzzle. Nice work!

6 Likes
15

Thank you for playing my game and leaving the review.

I am sorry about the crepe problem that I only discovered a few days ago and which has now been corrected.
Unfortunately, because of that bug you could not complete the game.

2 Likes
16

Awakened Deeply

R.A. Cooper
Played 2024-09-25

Die Hard in Space

Spoilery thoughts

I got a laugh out of my immediate embarrassing death.

Sleep Chambers
A small room with nothing but your Cryotube in it. You see the release mainframe to your right and the Port door to the west. The mainframe’s tacky lights and fixtures blink erratically. Captain Kirk would be proud. The Port Door has a red light above it indicating it is locked.

The vastness of space can be seen from this room. > Thousands of stars surround you, planets streaming slowly across the sky go in all different directions.

You can see Port door, Cryotube (empty), Hunting Knife and Bloody Note here.

> x mainframe
The release mainframe that handles the opening of the sleep chamber entry port. You don’t remember how to operate this. You see a small lever stating “Release -Push for entry/Pull for hatch”

> pull lever
You pull the lever. The hatch leading into space opens sucking you out. You have died.

*** The End ***

Interface design matters, folks. Also, who put the cryotube in the airlock?

I thought at first that this gag was meant to establish a dark comedic tone for the game. Instead this is a relatively self-serious Die Hard In space, with an ample supply of corpses.

There are some good moments in here: A properly-foreshadowed “hide in the closet” moment works well. The crew (and, er, ex-crew) we encounter are written in different voices, and if I’m not mistaken have names that loosely reference original Trek, so it was easy to project personalities onto them. Ending with a big choice was a good call. On the whole it works as a compact action-adventure.

There are a few spots where implementation was a bit uneven. One that stood out to me was this mention of a trail of blood, which I wanted to follow - after all, we’re being a hero an investigating a mystery.

> x marks
Several laser marks are along the wall. It looks like whoever overtook the ship lined several people against the Subway Station walls and executed them. There are blood drag marks where it looks like bodies were pulled off to somewhere.

> x drag marks
You can’t see any such thing.

> x blood
You can’t see any such thing.

Note, we do follow a trail of blood later.

I also found some naming unusual. I find “Platform Box” an unusual name for a transport, and doubly confusing that it seems to be called “Transport Car” from the other end, not to be confused by the four “Rails” in the Subway station, which we ride by going a direction, rather than by entering a vehicle.

I found most of the puzzles quite clear which was a good choice to keep the action-y pace up. The place I got stuck and turned to the walkthrough was really my fault - I couldn’t find the keycard, and eventually gave up looking before realizing that I could shoot the welded-shut closet with the gun. I’m not sure I would’ve gotten the “look up/look down” puzzle if I hadn’t spotted it in the walkthrough around this time; I’ll be curious to read how others found it.

I’d say it captures the fantasy! Well done.

5 Likes
17

Thanks for the review and taking the time to play the game. I really appreciate it.

1 Like