Dgtziea's Spring Thing 2026 Reviews (Maybe you'll respect this dead person instead / The Perilous Plot)

[dgtziea]

Spring Thing! Thanks to mathbrush for organizing, and appreciation and congrats go to all the authors that submitted. As always, my hope is for people to just keep on making stuff and to continue honing their craft.

The Missing City Council

This is the first interactive fiction piece from the author, according to their comments for their entry. “You’ve got to start somewhere, right?” they write. That’s true! As a piece of parser IF, this has some issues: things are implemented incorrectly, players are unlikely to solve it without a walkthrough, and it doesn’t seem like it’s been tested much. Their comment indicates the author might be aware of some of this. Instead of just reviewing this as an entry, I’ll try to write about it as a first time project.

It’s a PunyInform parser game. I remember looking at the PunyInform docs before and seeing that they recommended authors be familiar with Inform 6 beforehand, which indicated to me that PunyInform maybe isn’t what you’d want to start your very first project on.

As a first time project, I like that it’s quite small in scope. It’s just stairs leading up and down a multi-level building and then a room or two on each floor. There’s just one major puzzle, a few items. The story coherence and plausibility of the world isn’t there, but for a starting project, you shouldn’t get slowed down worrying about that sort of stuff anyways in my opinion. Just make the first things that come to your mind, implement something simple, then think of something else to try implementing. This has locked doors, hidden things, things you have to put in other things, state changes, NPCs. It’s got an elevator which isn’t very useful for the player (there’s stairs) but it’s a good idea as a thing to try to implement as you’re learning. This is all good first project stuff. The problem is that this just wasn’t quite ready for submission yet. It needed to be worked on more, and tested, and iterated on, and polished.

The biggest issue is that code wise, everything’s been declared as just an object, including stuff that should be scenery or doors, so they’re all just listed as items in each location (I’m basing this off what I know from Inform 7). There doesn’t seem to be directional movement at all, either; you just enter and exit rooms within rooms. So some of the facets of the language seemed to have been not utilized. I could just pick up the city hall in the starting locale, and then enter it! Your actual goal is to get into the room that’s blocked by some guards, and the guards like a good cup of tea. The guards don’t tell you that, though. The descriptions of some of the main things you need to interact with could be written to better indicate how they fit into the puzzle (could tell the player the cup of tea is cold, for example). I like a puzzle that involves what’s in the register room; it’s creative, it’s just not communicated well to the player in terms of feedback or description. The solution to how to enter the register room is something that doesn’t seem like it’s clued at all though unless I missed it, and there’s other guess-the-verb issues as well. Some missing descriptions. There’s also one step which seems to be rely on some specific real-world knowledge to know why you’d want to do it, involving oil (I did read an article about Starbucks adding oil to their coffee in certain countries, and that’s where I learned its alternative use. Ah, from googling it now, castor oil in particular is apparently specifically known for that purpose)

The creativity and ideas behind the steps in the puzzle are pretty good though, with a classic inventory puzzle structure where you solve some smaller puzzles to gather everything needed for the big overarching puzzle. The layout of the map and where all the items and things are is also well spaced out. There also seems to be a some fun ideas about what the story could be, in spots. There’s a foundation here, it just needs some more implementation work and player cluing.

Transcript:
council.txt (46.8 KB)

[dgtziea]

The Perilous Plot

This feels a bit like if a board game were implemented in Twine, which is a neat idea. You’re a villain, of the cackling, evil monologuing sort, and you face off against two randomly chosen heroes each playthrough who are trying to foil your dastardly plans. There’s a system with stats, modifiers, and dice rolls, and you’re trying to either gain enough “plot points” or cause the heroes to faint enough times to win. There’s different rooms in your mansion that you’re moving around in, as well as different weather effects, and each hero has a set of rooms and weather they’re stronger or weaker in. Each turn you move to a different room and then choose an action to take.

The description writing is all quite good, and each hero has a fun little profile, like the “Nosy Neighbor” or the “The Lurking Groundskeeper.” There’s randomness in the weather and room combinations you’re given each turn, but I don’t know if there’s much that’s procedurally generated; the text generally seems quite specific and unique as it describes scenes and actions, so it seems like the author might actually have just sat down and written out a lot of text for every single combination, which is impressive, because there seems to be a lot. The blurb said there’s 40,000 words!

But I don’t think I fully understood the different actions, and what the strategic risk/reward for each were. There’s two stages of decisions each turn, which is which room to be in, and then which action to take. The hero strength/weakness system could’ve made sense on a physical board where you have to traverse a layout of rooms and there was positioning or path-finding involved (for example), but here you’re given a random pair of weather-affected rooms to choose from (a library under somber clouds, or rain-drowned orchard trees, say). I never saw a reason to not just always go into the rooms the heroes were weakest in if possible.

There’s different sets of actions to choose from. But although the explanatory text tells me failing during “watch and wait” actions wouldn’t weaken my gaze stat, the text kept telling me my gaze power was decreasing anyways. I found it hard to tell why I would choose certain actions, like the two different watch and wait ones, which results wise, seemed roughly similar.

spoilery explanation of my strategy

Part of that might be how I was playing. After losing too many plot points and failing on my first playthrough while trying to get a handle of what all the actions did, on the second playthrough I just focused on trying to win. I would look out for rooms the heroes were weak in, and gloat to cause them to faint (this would succeed most of the time). otherwise I’d just search or use items, as the item actions didn’t seem to have much of a drawback. I only used an item successfully once, the will in the study, and it also just caused the heroes to faint I’m pretty sure. I also glared sometimes, but it didn’t seem any more rewarding than gloating. At some point later on after successfully gloating I could choose between stealing items from the heroes or just making them faint, and I did steal both items from them. I eventually gloated my way to victory (a bit of a monotonous one, because of my strategy).

A lot of the underlying systems are obscured so it was hard to tell, but I feel like I was losing plot points relatively quickly my first playthrough, like losing plot points for failing glares, for example, but I just started the game a third time for a quick test, and I couldn’t find any failed actions that loses me plot points anymore. Perhaps the heroes or the items they carry also affects this?

It’s a really cool setting and concept with a bunch of fun writing and scenes, I just didn’t understand the strategy layer. I think I did gain a plot point at least once, but I couldn’t tell you how I’d go for a plot point victory instead of a fainting one. There seems to be quite a bit of work and thought put into this, so hopefully it keeps getting worked on.

an action which seemed to both succeed and fail, possible bug?

The path is dappled with moonlight, patterns shifting with the breeze, causing you to feel dizzy. The moon is particularly bright tonight, penetrating through the thick foliage to shine light in the darkest of places, yet you do not feel safe here. Hopefully the heroes will not notice you.

You move through the forest without trying to stay quiet. The nosie of you crunching through the leaves is eerie, clearly bothering the heroes as much as the moonlit shadows disturb their vision.

‘You are outside your property!’ The heroes point out, ‘You have made the first of what will be many mistakes!’ They taunt you, as you realize you truly are beyond the boundary, and safety, of your estate.

You are cautiously optimistic.

Your dastardly presense causes the heroes to faint.
Curses! Your plot has been set back!

playthrough 1 end stats (lost)

Plot points: 0/11
Your gaze is Smouldering
You caused heroes to faint 3/13 times
Locations visited: 16/20
You have seen: the Study, the Drawing Room, the Laboratory, the Garden, the Attic, the Colonnade, the Country Road, the Balcony, the Bedroom, the Hallway, the Lakeshore, the Library, the Ruined Tower, the Stables, the Bridge, the Terraces
Weather experienced: 8/10
Last Month’s Forecast: Misty, Stormy, New Moon, Sunny, Cloudy, Snowy, Foggy, Downpour
Mirror-like objected glared into: 0
Items collected: 4/7
Hero items stolen: 0/2
You are holding: Deadly Gift, False Correspondence, Items for Blackmail, Token of Affection

playthrough 2 end stats (won)

Plot points: 5/11
Your gaze is Fiery
You caused heroes to faint 22/22 times
Locations visited: 19/20
You have seen: the Forest Path, the Grand Staircase, the Secret Room, the Bridge, the Hallway, the Colonnade, the Attic, the Balcony, the Bedroom, the Laboratory, the Drawing Room, the Library, the Orchard, the Country Road, the Garden, the Study, the Lakeshore, the Ruined Tower, the Terraces
Weather experienced: 10/10
Last Month’s Forecast: Sunny, Cloudy, Moonlight, New Moon, Stormy, Windy, Snowy, Downpour, Misty, Foggy
Mirror-like objected glared into: 4
Items collected: 5/7
Hero items stolen: 2/2
You are holding: Book of Lords, Mind Control Serum, Poisoned Wine, True Will, Warning Note

[dgtziea]

Maybe you’ll respect this dead person instead

Short, light adventure fantasy with guilds, monsters, swords, magic, written in Twine. You’re a summoner, and you’ve got four spirits with you, a varied bunch including a charismatic warrior and also a huge writhing tentacle monster. At various points during your adventure, you’ll need to choose which spirit to summon for help, including having them talk to people for you and also having them fight. At one point, another character asks you why you summon the spirits to speak for you, and I deliberately chose the tentacle monster, the one spirit of yours that can’t talk to answer, and I (predictably) didn’t get an answer.

The writing is quite fun and keeps things moving along, so even though it takes a few screens to figure out what’s going on, the writing kept me entertained throughout. It turns out you’re trying to join a hunter’s guild in the capital. Except you yourself are not a warrior, so the guild master is quite reluctant to accept you. But that’s not going to stop you, is it?

This does seem to assume I had a better handle on the characters than I actually did sometimes, and some of them might’ve used a bit more introduction. There’s a early sequences when you’re ordering drinks for all the spirits, and then later in a cave where you cycle through each of them for various things, where I think I was supposed to be learning about each spirit, but it was only just before a battle started that I realized that I knew next to nothing about one of them, Kara. Oh wait, they’re a giant with a sling?! Huh, maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention earlier on! The choices during the fighting did seem at least a bit forgiving so whether I knew enough about their skillset didn’t matter too much, as even though there better and worse choices, it’s not like you’d get an immediate game over. So I could just enjoy the action which is described pretty well, like when a character suddenly pulls out a giant, awesome flame sword(!).

A few minor issues with sentence clarity, like there’s an early line which I had to re-read a few times to parse correctly: “The perpetual lava falls on the cliff face backlight the marble white city in the evening light of the setting sun and the planet’s orbiting rings.” I was reading “falls” as a verb and not a noun, same with “face” and “backlight” also being a bit grammatically ambiguous.

“You” are a summoner, but there’s also an “I” in the story, one of the spirits, which was a unique storytelling choice. Most of it is second person narration, but whenever you summon that spirit, they start describing their own actions in first person. Occasionally slightly disorienting like in a scene where that spirit was talking to the guild master and the dialogue didn’t have any dialogue tags indicating who was speaking. Even when not summoned, they’re still able to describe what “you” the summoner are thinking and feeling, which made me think about if that meant all the spirits were emotionally attuned to the summoner. Oh, also the summoner is basically a blank slate, which a lot of IF does use of course, so you don’t learn much about them. I only really noticed when the guildmaster takes one look at you and rejects you–I briefly wondered what the summoner looked like that would make the guildmaster react that way.

There’s basically two types of choices in this, choosing spirits either to talk or to fight, and I especially liked the talking ones, because I liked just trying to pick the least suitable spirit just to see what would happen. The action was written well and creates stakes, but I also really liked just throwing them into social situations and seeing the spirits interact with others in humorous ways. It’s a lively set of characters, and I’d be interested to see more of their adventures and how they develop.