I started wondering if we’d played the same game, before realising that this is not Synaptix …
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Yikes! When did cut’n’paste get so HARD???
2 Likes
The skip encounter option is in the Setting menu! A bit obtuse, given that you wouldn’t normally expect to open settings mid-game. I also don’t really like combat and freely skipped all the fights after the first 2, the story and exploration was compelling enough that I still had a great time.
2 Likes
Marbles, D, and the Sinister Spotlight by Drew Cook
Played: 4/13/25
Playtime: 35m, finished, cat score 6 I think
Cat protagonist. This is what we’ve come to. If my credentials as a reviewer of superhuman dedication are ever in question, I call your attention to this review.
This is a light work whose overriding atmosphere is welcoming. From its friendly, welcoming wordsmithing, to its forgiving and increasingly nudgy gameplay; its limited vocabulary (meant as a design choice, not a criticism), to its stated purpose, as a feature showcase to budding Inform authors… all of it just conveys “C’mon in the waters fine, and not nearly as scary as you think.”
While I am clearly not the primary audience for any of these things, least of all its protagonist, the nature of its amiability is that it is impossible to begrudge the time spent. The presentation goes a long way to this feeling. From its care paid to Scene change formatting cues, its ascii cat ‘pause for more,’ its scorecard rendition, it is all very deliberate and polished, conveying we are in strong, gentle hands for the duration of this modest puzzle fest. Against a backdrop of parsers often characterized by an intimidating, minimalist and cold greater-than prompt, this work goes out of its way to make every part of the experience less vexing.
I could talk about what it sacrifices in service of that, but… why? I mean, it would be wild if I criticized Smokey the Bear for his inability to explain the difference between colon and semi-colon. Meet the big guy where he lives, yeah? This is a work that has a specific goal, and is SO successful at it other things don’t matter. Its creative tradeoffs are uniformly successful in service of that goal. Were I a blank slate at the beginning of my artistic journey, filled with unspecific ambitions and preoccupations and completely asea on how to even start, this work would be a godsend - both a reassurance, a first step, and a glimpse of what success could like.
It would feel outright inspirational, if not for the nagging feeling that its protagonist choice is a subtle and portentous warning. That the only cost the aspiring artist might pay is THEIR ENTIRE SOUL.
Horror Icon: Pinhead
Vibe: Welcoming
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project, it would be focused on TADS, not Inform. Just that one small change. Well, maybe just one more.
EDIT: neglected transcript
md_jjmcc.txt (58.2 KB)
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I’m grateful for your perseverance!
(and for your review, of course)
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Sacrificing the Rat refills a lot of Vitality. You can do this at the end of a summoning turn, first doing some damage by Infecting your opponent and then taking some strength by using Weaken. You should have enough action points left to use the Tribute action that refills up to 25 Vitality points. (Only once per battle.)
Exploring everywhere yields healing herbs sometimes, highlighted in the text. If you click on the herbs, you make a Healing Potion. I think you need to have met a certain NPC first to learn this skill.
2 Likes
A Bottle from the Future by SKIT
Played: 4/13/25
Playtime: 20m, 2 endings, 9/10 on quiz
I feel a little betrayed by my randomizer. Putting this ahead of the Seneca Thing proper feels a little cart-before-horsey. But to rebel against it now… what am I if not a slave to my innumerable conceits? Do I even EXIST OUTSIDE MY SELF-IMPOISED FRAMEWORK??? No that is an existential angst I choose not to plumb.
Instead, let me plumb the angsts of a first time author! There is something heady about the raw, unfiltered creativity of engaging a new communication medium. The thrill of learning new skills, and putting them in service of a creative vision, it is a boiling, bubbling, embarrassment of riches, a swirling soup of enthusiasm that latches on to the prose, the construction, and carries to the reader. This was my overwhelming sense of this piece - an enthusiasm to pack if full of graphics, external educational links, meaningful choice points and classically-informed mini puzzles. Stir it all together into a wonderful, asymmetric stew of an experience.
I particularly liked how it simultaneously functioned as an education vehicle (on the myth of Atlantis and a primer on ecological responsibility), and an unsentimental view of human history. As we navigate the events via our time-lost bottle, two options loom large. To view the last days of Atlantis (whose parallels to modernity seem very deliberate), or to pen a missive of warning hoping to avert that end.
That latter effort received with a resolutely cold “Time is a great wall, and my message is only a stone thrown against it.” The work acknowledges the limits of communication when communication is rebuffed, but somehow nevertheless infuses a stubborn optimism IN THE VERY ACT OF IT. And makes LEARNING an act of defiance.
Yes, the work carried artifacts of an author engaging new tools but was considered and complete nevertheless. And its cautionary, defiant enthusiasm more than compensated any rookie missteps.
Horror Icon: Regan/Pazuzu
Vibe: Stealth Education
Polish: Textured
Gimme the Wheel! : I would not deign to sieze the wheel of anyone’s first effort. The joy of completing a project, of capturing messages you feel compelled to share in a medium that continually offers new mechanisms for it.. everyone should experience that without me grabbing the wheel!
5 Likes
anpa ma by Vivian Rose
Engaged: 4/14/25
My apologies. There simply was no way for me effectively engage this work.
I did try. In a misguided brainstorm, I started to play side-by-side with a translate app, cutting and pasting large swaths of game output from one window to another. During dense text interactions, like reading poetry from a book, I could, for a moment, immerse myself in the work. Much more commonly, the mechanics of select-cut-swipe-paste-scroll-repeat were intrusively mechanical and fiddly and leached away any hope I had of true engagement. This is simply an unfair and unrewarding way to engage a work of art. I wouldn’t want to experience SOLZHENITSYN this way, so this work is in good company.
It is, of course, perfectly valid to have a limited target audience for your work. Particularly in bringing a style of art to a community historically walled off from it by language. I hope it finds a receptive audience that can appreciate it.
6 Likes
I think I’m going to find some time, at some point, to give this one a proper go, rather than attempting to casually play it on a Saturday afternoon, in the same way that I wouldn’t attempt to read Finnegans Wake unless I were going to give it serious time. I am very curious about it, though, after a first casual attempt, and would love to crack it and figure out what some of the words mean!
3 Likes
Thank you JJMcC, for your responsive review. I am in the process of getting certificates ready for our Thursday’s matiné where our gamebookers are receiving certificates with quotes from these reviews. I feel I can’t part with a single word of what you ve just written. I am sure it will be most apprecidted by the author. 
1 Like
Thanks very much for your thoughtful review. I’m pleased you enjoyed the subversive nature of the story and that the ending resonated strongly with you – the “Serling” comparison made my day! I truly appreciate you taking the time to play and provide such insightful feedback, especially regarding the parser. Your transcript is already proving invaluable in pinpointing areas for improvement.
Fear the Shadow Beast.
1 Like
As I Sat On a Sunny Bank by Senica Thing
Played: 4/13/25
Playtime: 1hr total, 8 games, what a bargain!
The Senica student anthology has become an indispensable part of the Spring Thing in my head. Probably because it’s been here as long as I have, I’ve never seen a Thing WITHOUT one! I look forward to it every year. So much creativity in such small bundles, ripe for rapid consumption and enjoyment. The low-pressure uniting theme (this year is ‘found on a riverbank/seashore’) giving a form for the inspiration to follow. What a great part of this community, and what a great batch of games this year.
If I did the ‘blurb/learnings’ thing again, it would cast that in stone going forward, so instead I am going to break and do it more freeform. I will close with a ‘my favorite thing…’
A Brand New World /by Raiden/ (15m, 3 endings)
I would love to be coy and teasing with ‘what do you think is found on the beach..?’ but its right there in the title! Probably not what you expected, no? There was a really nice twist in this one, as some background text hinted that people were going missing, but it turned out they just didn’t want to come back! That was a really clever twist on what we might expect to be a horror premise. Instead, the player gets an all-to-brief introduction to an imaginative and playful fantasy world.
My favorite thing: I really like the long paragraphs of deep description. The author took the time to paint a vivid picture of their fantastical setting, and really conveyed it well.
BOTTLE /by M.A.S./ (5m, 5 endings)
Ok, this one ALSO telegraphs the found object in its title! It’s a classic, but this one ups the tension a bit with a large branch of endings that jump on you quickly and impactfully. This is a very streamlined, interesting branching game, very replayable due to its tight depth.
My favorite thing: The IF version of jump scare is the text message that both the player and protagonist character read together. If there is a two-word phrase MORE charged than You’re Next! I don’t know what it is.
Fragments of the Nile /by Storyteller/ (5m, 4 endings)
Here’s a story that hides its found object from the title! The player is an archeologist, interacting with a find that has some secrets. I am a horror fan (I mean the whole conceit of this year’s reviews attests to this), so this story was right up my alley. There are quite a few endings available, and interestingly some tie together building a fuller picture of the threat. This is a very good use of multiple ending IF!
My favorite thing: I think this one really went the extra mile to establish its Eqyptian archeology setting. There are a few screens worth of table setting that really bring the player into the story very effectively.
Nothing /by Gooseberry/ (5m, 6 endings)
Here we find a book on the shore, one that we are continually presented with opportunity to reject, neglect, or read and follow. As game players we are likely to want to engage, but the continual variations on ‘ignore it’ are kind of funny and present a low-key realistic picture of life. We might as easily forget things we stumble across as engage them! If we do engage, we are treated to a time travel scenario where we might learn a bit… and might suffer some unexpected consequences!
My favorite thing: This game rewarded investigation. Careful players can find clues down one branch to keep from dying in another. This kind of player driven setup-payoff is one of the stronger aspects of IF - letting the player have a fair chance at navigating its more dire outcomes!
POWER TURTLE /by 3N/ (5m, 5 endings
What might we find at the shore, other than shore life? Here, the player rescues a.. well, you see it in the title. From there, you are treated to a VERY broad branching decision tree, leading a large array of outcomes. It is very ambitious and very well done. Every branch seems fully fleshed out with the consequences and subsequent choices to make. It was kind of thrilling how wide the space got, very quickly.
My favorite thing: I explored a lot of endings, and what was really cool was while they were all very different, depending on player choices, they were all pretty ‘good’! Just in very logical and satisfying ways! Conditioned to expect shock twists, or ‘good/bad’ endings, this was a delightful surprise.
Those voices are getting louder, captain. /by Mushroom/ (5m, 2 endings)
This is a quick dialogue tree game, where the protagonists is talking to a shipmate about something he may or may not have seen. The ‘found object’ of this game. The game does a good job of presenting varying responses you might take to the poor man’s ravings, culminating in a neat twist that fully reflects how seriously you have taken his ravings!
My favorite thing: I am torn. On the one hand, my favorite thing was the use of color cues to reinforce the endings. Default color/font schemes put all the emphasis on text to carry the load, but graphical flourishes are very much part of IF and should not be neglected! On the other hand, The author does
something cheeky with their choice dialogue, where the main character’s thoughts are parenthesized and italicized. They form an often quite amusing inner dialogue that contrasts humorously to the spoken dialogue, and in some places soft-guides the player.
Untilted by BB-Anon (5m, 6 endings)
This particular found object leads the player on a mini-exploration of a section of the beach. I really liked the real sense of geography the game conveyed. I could picture the beach/cliff/road area I was wandering around in. Depending on choices I made, I might not get farther than the investigation, or I may get to some really funny-bananas endings. I don’t want to spoil it, but I had no idea that was ANYONE’S wish, let alone mine! :]
My favorite thing: As a wannabe game designer myself, I really liked how this author reconverged their choices where it made sense. If you go down one branch, you may find yourself on a different branch due to how those choices bring you to a similar state. This is very important tool in the IF author’s tool box, and I love seeing it here!
Wonder of the Woods… by Leontine (& Eudokimos) (15m)
Wow, this one blew me away. The graphical presentation, scripted font, the wonderful character and animal illustrations.. the enthusiasm and love in the project really came through. As a player, you get to explore a quartet (quintet?) of friends, each of which has an animal friend, as they try to engage their section of river and a difficult friend of theirs. It is both deep and broad, and really paints a full picture of friends cooperating in a very busy, very important afternoon.
My favorite thing: It would be easy to say that the graphical care was my favorite, but I actually think I liked the game setup even more. Being able to play as four different girls, each with their own animal friend was plain fun. All four were different, and their adventures varied. And they all came together at the end in a satisfying, choice-driven way. Yeah, I’m sticking with the game design as my favorite.
Viva la Senica Thing!
Horror Icon: Crypt Keeper. Ok, he’s not one of the icons I pre-selected, and I was VERY tempted to go “Children of the Corn” here, but no. I have pitched this year on year, so Crypt Keeper is reserved for Senica.
Vibe: Anthology
Polish: Textured
Gimme the Wheel! : No. Give MORE students the Wheel!
5 Likes
Portrait with Wolf by Drew Cook
Played: 4/13/25
Playtime: 45m, 13/8 bailed without unlocking Guide sections
Light-fantasy parsers run the risk of become samey in a player’s mind. Both in the moment and more so on reflection. They are such a staple of the field, you really have to cut new ground somehow to get them to stand out. Similarly for slice-of-life relationship dramas, though those at least have the hook of (usually) singular character work. Y’know what I can’t accuse of saminess? Weird poetry- and art- driven works that marry an impish sense of humor, playfulness of form and nearly opaque bizarrity.
Those things stick with you. I offer PWW as Exhibit A here.
The conceit, such as it is, is to select a series of abstractly themed art inspirations, to nominally sketch for an installation. Choose six times from a pool of four categories, three of which are delightfully random. The fourth being ‘a cat.’ In return you get a pithy line, a spot of poetry, a quasi-parser room description, or an anecdote, all very evocative and also standalone and unrelated to each other. All of it presented under a mutating boilerplate ‘restart’ title-author.
Y’know one way to get me to stop complaining about ‘poetry’? Make it good. Y’know the other way? Keep me so off balance, mentally, that I don’t have time to fuss with that, consumed as I am with clawing for mental purchase against the opaque logic of the thing. PWW does BOTH of those things! It would be easy to push into a state where I would just throw my hands in the air in desperation and futility and abandon things. Which I eventually did. But MAN did it take a long time!
The playful vibe of the thing is its overriding impression, just dazzling with inventiveness and unexpected text. This is augmented by a “guide/help system” that seems to be as playful as the rest of the work, if a bit more structured. I say ‘seems’ because I never actually got to consume much of it.
Oh, I was gamely playing along, no doubt about that. I was really enjoying it. After each set of 6, there was a portentous “status is X out of eight” message. Clear enough, right? As I closed in on 8 though, after hitting its wild themes in many combinations.. nothing changed. Well, one thing changed, I started to get some repetition. This did not itself break things, those repetitions were scattered among many novel ideas, but it did make me think ‘if you KNOW the player is going to go for 6x8 = 48 of these things, wouldn’t you have at least that many in the chamber, front-loaded?’ That was only a mild ripple compared to what happened when I closed the 8th run.
Which was nothing. No newly available guide sections were unlocked. No achievements noted. No textual acknowledgement other than the score itself. If the end note highlighted anything, it did not read as significant or different than the wryly fantastic observations of the other 7. So I kept going. 9/8, 10/8… all the way to 13/8. More and more repetition, but nothing new of note. Ok that’s a crazy thing to say about this work. SO MUCH new playful text. Just nothing new ludically.
I mean, I clearly missed the point of this. Let me tell you one more thing about how I engaged this piece. This Spring Thing has inflicted on me a variety of feline-influenced works at this point. You KNOW I am bull headed about this. For the first 8 runthroughs, I ignored that inspiration and only played with the other 3 in many varieties and combinations. All of 1, alternating, cyclical patterns, drum rudiment patterns. I flirted with a lot of them. At pass 9, my thought was ‘ok, maybe the work NEEDS me to bring in the Cats.’ So I tried that, begrudgingly. To no apparent effect. Did this perverse playstyle of mine trip over some subtle code artifacts? Don’t know.
I DO know the repetition got more dense. I suspect there is some sort of selection patterning that might be decodable. I find it hard to believe that 4 full sections of Guide are headfakes, including a bit on Sylvia Plath (whose work I was previously unfamiliar with, but who this piece encouraged me to explore). But after spending so long with it, enjoying the wild disconnects and playfulness of form, I was kind of unwilling to go back and treat those as logic puzzles. They just worked so WELL as disconnected shots of joy, I didn’t WANT to gamify them. It felt.. disrespectful.. to treat these wonderful bits of wordplay as functional puzzle pieces when their appeal was SO not functional.
I mean:
You are a lot of not much to look at.
Those who burn meat
to please the gods
know little of meat or gods
Why do I want to do ANYTHING with that other than just titter delightedly? I am 100% sure I did not crack the code of this thing, and may in fact have confounded it. I am equally sure that it lived up to its FIRST boilerplate title block:
A fun activity <3 by Drew Cook
Release Nulla / Serial number 12345 / Inform 7 v10.x / D
This is a fun game with a gimmick.
That is true even if you never tumble to the gimmick.
Horror Icon: Regan/Pazuzu
Vibe: Creative Chaos
Polish: Gleaming or Textured, depending on the function of that 13/8 score
Gimme the Wheel! : What would I do next if this were my project? Hm. It is so clearly NOT something I’m capable of, so that’s hard to answer. I guess I would poke into that ‘nothing happens at 8/8’ artifact. Either sharpen the artistic statement for the dummies in the back row, or fix any bugs that need fixing.
pw_jjmcc.txt (71.0 KB)
6 Likes
Thanks for your review! That counter is a stinker, I’ll do an updated release. I appreciate you bringing it up!
So far as progression, though… If I’m reading the transcript right, it looks like the next step is "cats are our friends" (choose “cat” at least four times in a series).
Thanks again for checking this–and my other game–out!
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I DO NOT CONSENT TO THAT!!! 
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Thank you JJ, I read your review with extreme pleasure and satisfaction. Your words are well invested. Thanks.
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Thank you for the feedback and the time it took to read it.
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Thank you for your feedback!
1 Like
Succor by By Loressa, Matthias Speksnijder and Dactorwatson
Played: 4/21/25
Playtime: 1hr, Demon Hunter(2), Healthy Appetite(1); 2 playthroughs
If there is a category of reviews I struggle with, it is for trauma- or therapy-based IF. Don’t get me wrong, IF is a TREMENDOUS tool to use to build empathy, sympathy, and commiseration for people that can probably use a bit of daylight in their lives. It’s just, if I am not afflicted with the particular concerns of the work, my takes are always a bit suspect. The BEST I can do is approach from an empathy perspective, and even then, I am subject to debilitating blind spots in my engagement.
This is a work whose protagonist struggles with crippling, depressive self-doubt compounded with emotional family trauma. The nature of the work is to explore the protagonist’s apartment, struggle to accomplish daily tasks against a backdrop of near-insurmountable motivation gaps, and experience shadowed flashbacks when considering takeout menus. Ok, rereading that last sentence, that is way more glib than I intended. Food and food preparation are integral touchstones for the protagonist, so the conceit is not unjustified.
Moment by moment it works pretty well. The ‘marketing’ descriptions on the menus are particularly well done, and the contrast between them and their less idealized memories is wryly impactful. If you probe the menus deeply enough you are confronted with representative mental demons that are evocative, nicely metaphorical and attractively illustrated. These are all very strong aspects of the work.
The interactivity is where I could feel my blind spots encroaching. On the one hand, atop the screen are three attributes that seem to gauge the player’s effectiveness and mental state. Not only did I not detect an impact to those, I did not seem to be able to modify them in a predictable way. In particular, if I deliberately chose the most unhealthy responses, the stats remained resolutely unchanged. Nor did that seem to influence future possible choices.
Further, there was little to no back pressure when selecting the most optimistic, constructive choices. Given the dramatic language of the inner monologue, this felt.. too easy? This culminated in gameplay that unveiled more food menus if you just kept cleaning, well beyond a threshold even nominally healthy me would be capable of!
Another dissonant tone for me was the breadth of the menus (not all of which I encountered during one playthrough!). A wide variety of ethnicities is represented in restaurants. All of which can trigger childhood memories of family preparation? That is a VERY cosmopolitan family! The language used to describe this SEEMED to lean into handed-down legacies, but were so broadly applied I went from experiencing a SPECIFIC family story to a muddied, ‘wait, what is their heritage now?’
So, all of these things kept me at a bit of an arm’s length, until I considered it in retrospect. What if this was NOT intended to be a rigorous recreation of mental struggles? What if, instead, this was a determinedly encouraging work, aimed at players commiserating with the protagonist? The message was not ‘this is what it feels like’ but ‘you CAN do this, even if it doesn’t feel like it.’ ‘No matter how bad your past choices, you can make a different choice next time.’ The work was simultaneously acknowledging that life experiences can suck and put nearly unsustainable pressures on us, while offering that it is still in our power to grapple with it. We need not be defeated even when it feels like we have been. What I initially read as ‘reductively easy problem solutions’ became instead a cheerleading of some kind, offering hope. And maybe even a bit of wish fulfillment to sweeten the pot.
The blurb for the work seems to echo this take for me, and elevated the whole thing beyond my clinical ‘realism’ knee jerk. The fact that a work of subtle optimism and support can be wrapped in (and punch through!) a graphical package of such evocative darkness is kind of… wonderful.
Horror Icon: Leatherface
Vibe: Wrestling Demons
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project I would be forced to acknowledge that I was pretty unprepared to engage this subject matter. I would focus, then, on maybe sharpening the protagonist’s ethnic heritage a bit. Pick a few each runthrough to center a family experience on and steer other menus to a different, less immediate shading. I say this in the full acknowledgement that it could double the word count!
4 Likes
Big thank you for the review JJ! 
1 Like