“Us Too” is a parser game, by Andrew Schultz. Schultz is the prolific and talented author of a style of word-games which would be hard to compare with other games, so I mostly limit my review to comparing this one to other Andrew Schultz games.
The central mechanic of this game is to recognize two word homonyms from descriptions in the text. These words will be solutions to puzzles which are used to advance the narrative, “Bar coat” might become “Bark oat”. I don’t think that particular example appears in this game, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Schultz has already thought of it. According to the in-game notes, this borrowed a lot of the code from “Why Pout” (Wipe out), along with some of the left over puzzle ideas he wasn’t able to fit into that earlier game.
I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to find the homonym for the title “Us too” (you’ll need it near the end of the game) but oh boy, even as I write this I’m finding other hidden meanings in the blurb text “Aunt Ricky-Anne”
Tricky
One thing I thought this game excelled at was its highly polished in-game hint system, which I used a lot. There are no explicit hints given (for a walk through, you’ll need to refer to the available external walk-through file). However, there is a tool in the player’s inventory which can be used to identify word pairs of importance, and more powerfully the number of letters in each word of the solution. The player is gently hinted if they get even a single word correct of a solution, and if a solution is correct but will not be used until a later time. All very helpful, and very well coded into the game. Then if even the hints fail, there is another tool in inventory which can be used to skip puzzles, albeit only a limited number of times and with a penalty to the score. There are also a number of bonus points that can be earned along the way (I found only one of these).