Josh Grams's Spring Thing 2025 thoughts

I’ve played three so far:


The Goldilocks Principle - what a range. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed this delightedly at a game about an eating disorder. The level of effort put into urging you to reconsider your choice of how triggering you ant this experience to be, that it comments differently on the one that you choose first… excellent. And then of course the multiple tellings of the “same” story. The narrator voice actually reminded me a bit of Chandler Groover’s Eat Me.

There were some good text effects in the level 5 story, but mostly the timed text was just obnoxious, of course. Don’t use timed text, people!


As the Fire Dies - this was charming. I liked a lot about this - a dreamscape is a perfect place for the light adventure-game logic. The surrealism felt like a nice amount to me - it’s strange and you don’t quite know what’s going on but it’s not so strange that you can’t figure out what you might be supposed to do.

The writing and mechanics were consistently just a little rough - some redundant adjectives and word choices that are technically grammatical but don’t quite fit where they were used. And while there are indications that the fire is getting low, they’re worked into the prose in ways that aren’t obvious unless you’ve visited that location before and happened to notice that the description has changed - and the descriptions are just long enough that you’re likely to skim/skip them on a second visit, and the puzzles are straightforward enough that you may not revisit the locations much… I didn’t figure out that there was any indication about the fire getting low until the last scene where it becomes crucial to the mechanics.

But those are minor things: tricky problems in game writing/design. This was fun!


Echoes - more escape-room-eque fun from Ben Jackson. This trio of lightly-connected games (pedantic: a group of works by the same author is a “collection” while “anthology” implies multiple authors) do interestingly different things: The Labyrinth is a four-character game which could be played by up to four separate people sharing info “who has the code for the blue key?” (and is probably most fun that way), Sticks & Stones is a charming dungeon crawl that can be played by clicking the links or by using the four arrow keys for the at-most-four options at each location (and slightly-real-time combat events: choose which action to take before the turn timer runs out), and Treasure of the Deep is… I think just a thing that you click through for the origin story?

Fun! Very smooth. Almost too smooth?

I would have liked to see a little more variety in The Labyrinth between the four characters: I still enjoyed it but playing by myself it did get a little tedious at some points doing exactly the same thing with all four characters and then collating the results. I could have done without the departures from a strict grid-based map in Sticks & Stones because I couldn’t find the final item with the fighter, and I eventually had to stop and draw a map to see what I’d missed, largely because of that. But that was a limitation of the control scheme, mostly.

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Cut the Sky - I still haven’t played either of SV Linwood’s other games, despite them having come first and third in recent IFComps. But this was nice. Strictly limited parser (look, examine, wait, talk to, cut, and for some reason kiss? haha), stark evocative descriptions of a harsh decaying (?) world. Wander through 14 chapters of set-pieces, waiting (for the perfect moment to strike) and then cutting your way through difficulties (but choose your target carefully–you do not wish for blood to stain your hands).

Just remember to examine everything - I ended up resorting to the walkthrough a lot. Maybe I was just too tired to be playing this game, but I think also the very minimalist 3-5 word descriptions of many objects tripped me up and I stopped looking at all of them and missed relevant objects. Whoops. The descriptions aren’t inappropriate: they fit the game perfectly. But… yeah. Still made me overlook that some things exist.

I spent way too much time working out the “legendary riddle of Nom Avrak” just because it was there. This game feels… idk, naturalistic (?) enough that a random puzzle-hunt kind of puzzle felt slightly out of place, but it’s clearly clued that you’re supposed to ignore it, and anyway I had fun with it, so whatever.

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Retool Looter - not sure if I should really be talking about this, since I did playtest it and I guess it was also my prompt that it was based on, but dangit, I liked this game.

Different from Charm Cochran’s usual work in some ways (not at all horror-inflected, for one thing), but feels very characteristic in others? Somewhat…detached from reality as we know it, but a nice sense of place and people, often evocative but minimalist in some ways, too? Experimenting with some sort of mechanic or structure…

Right, I haven’t said what the game is about. Anadromes - words that reverse to form another word. You’re an (inexperienced?) agent given a word-reversing ray gun and sent in to rescue a bunch of experienced agents who have gotten caught and reversed. Fun spy/heist kind of game: just squeaking by when you really shouldn’t. Sometimes tricky.

Unfortunately my least favorite bit came right near the start: after being given a satisfying response to trying to reverse a dog (and hey, you can pet and pat it, for those who care about that), I was rudely informed that “rood” is not, as far as you’re aware, an English noun – and then, to add insult to injury, your handler follows up by telling you that it is… but giving you several obviously bogus “definitions” to choose from to guess what it means (but of course the actual definition is not a choice)… and then informs you that it’s too “archaic” for the reversal gun to work on. Gah. Don’t talk down to me like that.

Other than that I had a good time with it, though.

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Whoops, got through five of the Senica Thing games (the collection is As I Sat on a Sunny Bank) and then realized that that was too many and I was getting confused what I thought about which so I’m going to have to go back and take notes. Some delightful stuff in here as usual though.

Well, maybe I’ll go backwards from where I started. (Edit: yeah, I worked back through four of them. A Brand New World is longer and I need to take a break from writing so I’ll come back to that).

Hmm. I guess I should also say that most of these have an intro screen with a Credits link that lists how many passages and how many endings, but they’re all short (so far).


POWER TURTLE by 3N (three 13-year-olds). I was giggling all the way through this. You find a little turtle trapped in a net and you want to take it home but you also need to help it find its mother. And then strange things happen. Which you should experience for yourself, because they’re fun. A lot of these stories are time caves - and often every branch comes completely out of nowhere (go left? you die. go right? you live. How were you supposed to know that?). This one (I think) joined back together at one or two places, and did a good job with the links giving you something to anticipate (and then often changing directions and surprising you).


Nothing by Goosberry (13 years old). This is a story about a boy in Japan who finds a magic book by the river. It had really good spelling and grammar in the first bunch of the many many :grin: options the game gives you to not have an adventure at the beginning and then the passages got way longer and more enthusiastic and could have used more checking. Oh. So this is a Gauntlet structure (see previous link): find your way past all the dead ends to the story the author is trying to tell. And a bunch of the dead-ends were fun enough to make it well-worth searching for the way through.


Fragments of the Nile by Storyteller (15 years old). As I said at the beginning, a lot of these were classic Choose Your Own Adventure book structures where the branches in the game have nothing to do with one another and if you could flip through the passages like you do through the pages of the book you’d be thinking “there’s a story in here about what?!” But in this one (while it’s still a classic adventure story about an amateur archaeologist going (maybe) to a dig in Giza) they seemed like they were giving different perspectives on the same situation, which was really cool. It still kept some of the same feel of surprise, dead-ends, etc. but it all felt planned to fit together. Well done!


Bottle by M.A.S. (13 years old). Instead of the usual hey, this is a first-timer, The Guild Master’s note says:

The game was nearly untouched by the tester, so that the entrant could receive a fully targeted feedback from Spring Thing reviewers. It is our first-timer´s privilege to plead for a well measured review even though their debut lacks some necessary polish.

But I don’t know that I have much critique. It finds an efffective style with very short passages. I don’t know if this was intentional, but I think that brevity works well for it. It’s missing some articles (a, an, the) and the sentence structures are simple, but I think the spelling and grammar have fewer errors than most of the games I’ve seen in this anthology so far. I liked that the “Open it” / “Leave it” choice wasn’t just an immediate end of the story. And the second “Leave it” result was probably my favorite in the game.

I guess I do think that the choices after you choose to open the bottle were the weakest. Links are more fun when they give you enough to imagine what might happen, and try to choose between them …and then the storyteller can either give you the thing you wanted (“aha, you’re right! and…”) or maybe give you what you want but something else goes wrong, or occasionally tell you no (“actually, this other weird thing happened instead!”).

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Big Thanks, Josh, for your extensive reading and, as usual, very kind and informative feedback. I especially appreciate your comments on the genre and your feelings as a reader - both of great value to the new authors. I pass this on as you write it and together with our international team (this year there are two countries taking part in Senica Thing) we are looking forward to read some more :slight_smile:

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Huge thanks for the feedback Josh. :grinning_face:

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Back at it… I privately sent some notes to Ondrej, but for anyone else who might be thinking of playing these…

A Brand New World, by Raiden (19) and These voices are getting louder, captain by Mushroom (14, repeat participant) were definitely a bit bigger and more carefully thought-out, though still on the small branching gauntlet-ish model. Mushroom has a nice line in internal monologue and insults, if a bit (OK, more than a bit) enthusiastic with the punctuation.

Untitled by BB-Anon (14 years old, at the other school in Slovenia) had notes that it had been moderately re-designed by one of the adults to be connected in a way that made more sense, but it was a nice little story about cleaning up the beach and then possibly finding a treasure map and getting a wish granted. Or maybe you don’t get a wish granted and you just have to do the clean-up the hard way.

And finally (I think? Have I missed any?) Wonder of the Woods by Ondrej and his 7-year-old daughter Leontine, I believe? This one was a little more built-out, like some of the other returning authors. The structure was a little confusing: it opens with a cast of characters and a “Back to Introduction” link and I sort of expected clicking on the characters to give a bio and then “Introduction” to begin the story. But it turns out that this is the start of the story: you can find out what’s going on with each character, and from there follow them and their friends, and at some point time advances and you can get later moments from different clusters of characters. It ended up telling a decent story but it’s an ambitious way to do it and it got a little tangled up: sometimes it was hard to tell what was going forward and what was more descriptions that you’d already seen.

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We Stole a Ship to Run a Scam - I tend to treat the “fiction” as the important part of “interactive fiction” so graphical stuff like RPG-maker games has a spotty track-record for me - it tends to just feel like timed text (you have to wait to get to the next discussion) and the fact that you’re controlling the character so you have a slight something to do and something to look at along the way doesn’t really make up for that.

But this one actually did a pretty decent job with moving quickly and doing reasonable things with its limited art style; not bad. I especially liked the “coming back to the dock and seeing the other ship pulling in” view. But on the other hand it felt like the authors didn’t have a good handle on the mechanical aspects of the art style: when you enter a new scene, is it clear which way is back the way you came? Is it clear which directions are exits and which are dead-ends, or do you have to walk around and find out? Is it clear which objects might be interactable? They didn’t do quite so well there.

And the interactive storytelling had a lot of choice points for something that’s only a few minutes long, but all of them immediately joined back up, most of them slotted the variation that responded to your choice into the exact same slot, a lot of the responses were sort of “go away, I can’t talk to you now” (or at least felt like they were closing off possibilities more than hinting at a bigger interesting world beyond the bounds of the story). So it sorta felt like maximum authoring work for minimum “ha, I’m happy I made that choice” moments and a lot of “huh, maybe I was supposed to choose one of the other options” ones.

But whatever. It was only a few minutes; it was a cute little romp.

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Thanks, Josh. Ambicious is a good point. I thought if I learnt how to add a side bar, it might become more user-friendly.

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Hi Josh—thank you so much for your kind review! I definitely went overboard with the timed text after discovering how much easier it is to implement in Twine than in Inform, and if I have time soon I’m hoping to make an edit remedying that. I also so appreciate the comparison to Eat Me, which is one of my favorite pieces of IF ever!

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I played Spring Gothic and Wayfarers, two pieces of writing that I liked but which were marred by poor presentation.

In the case of Spring Gothic I just straight-up wish it had been an ebook. A PDF could have preserved the art, and the interaction added nothing but annoyance for me, waiting for all the obnoxious animations. Ugh. But I liked the writing (Gothic indeed), and the background art was a nice touch.

Wayfarers did more with the interactive nature: most of it is also entirely linear but it has some nice moments of “here are the choices that your character isn’t going to choose.” Shame about all the timed text. And, y’know, the pieces set in a script font that are animated to sway side-to-side in case the font wasn’t painful enough to read on its own. And the way it leaves the default Harlowe history controls in place for the entire game (where you don’t really need them), but then at the very end where the big choices take place… it waits until you’ve made the final choice and then pulls a timed jump to the credits which removes the sidebar with the back link. How’s that for a bait-and-switch? All you had to do was not take away the control that you’ve given us through the entire rest of the game, oof.

But presentation aside, I really liked it. LitRPGs and novels about omg we’re in a videogame tend to have me rolling my eyes and quitting in the middle, but this piece had a light enough hand that it didn’t cross the line into me feeling like “Thank you, Captain Obvious, I do know what a videogame is. And gee, yes, I have heard of the idea of uploading people into a computer/machine, it’s not like people have been writing stories about this for over half a century or anything… next you’ll be telling me you invented sex.” It treated it mostly pretty matter-of-factly as a canvas for the rest of the story. Nicely done.

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Hi Josh, thank you so much for taking the time to play Wayfarers. I appreciate the commentary! I had one follow-up question, if you are open to it - “the pieces set in a script font that are animated to sway side-to-side” - do you have any examples of that? I’m not sure what this refers to, so I’m wondering if this is an issue that shows up in different browsers/mobile.

Also, I was intrigued by your comment regarding moments of “here are the choices that your character isn’t going to choose.” - Is this referring to, for instance, the list of games the character can play?

Thank you again for your time. I really appreciate your feedback and hope to make improvements based on it.

Huh. On a quick skim through the source I’m not finding the animated script ones. Maybe it was the slide-in-from-the-right and not a sway, but I thought there were about three of them.

The choices that aren’t actually offered, like “Continue: yea/nay” but only “yea” is a link, or I thought there were a few others with multiple options: did one NPC give you a bunch of questions but you could only choose something like “is this real?” or “I want to find my friend?” Those can be tricky to pull off well, and I liked them here: a nice change of pace in the flavor of the click-to-continue links. Emily Short’s Moments of Non-Choice or Cat Manning’s Successful Reflective Choices also feel sorta relevant here.

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I bounced hard off Repeat the Ending several times, so I wasn’t going to try Drew Cook’s games, but Dan Fabulich and the SF Bay Area IF meetup played Marbles, D, and the Sinister Spotlight yesterday and it was a charming short children’s-inflected text adventure (move over TALJ) so I then went and played with it some more myself, and also tried Portrait with Wolf.

…which is not my thing and I have very little idea what to even think about it but it grabbed my attention the whole way through anyway. I think for me there was a tension between my wanting to flip through quickly and try things to figure out what the heck was going on with the mechanics, and the poetry being oblique enough that it demanded a lot of attention (from me) to figure out what it might have to say or feel …and as usual for me in interactive media I’ll always believe the mechanics more than the words so I kinda spun through the middle of it and… yeah. I slowed down for a few bits but mostly I saved a transcript to digest and think about the poetry more later.

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Hauntless is a… randomly varied murder mystery? Ambitious. Maybe even too ambitious; it felt a little glitchy and I suspect I got lucky to get a set of clues that made sense to me. And the language got a little carried away at times (and there were I think two jarringly repetitive bits of word usage: “In someone’s idea of an elaborate idea of a prank” was one of them). Little continuity errors: this is being sold as having been the permanent home of the circus but there are places where it’s described in ways that only make sense for a travelling show, that kind of thing.

But I had a lot of fun with this. Yeah. Some nice bits of language, and I had fun piecing together what was going on. But it did feel like the author overreached slightly and couldn’t quite keep all the balls in the air. An audacious effort.

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The Oxford/London IF group had a virtual play-spring-thing-games-together meetup and I got to play @radiosity’s Echoes: The Labyrinth with voice chat and different people on all four characters and it was terrific fun. Definitely the way it should be played, if at all possible.

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Oh, that sounds great - really glad to hear you enjoyed it (and that it worked)!

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