Josh Grams's Spring Thing 2026

Competitions Spring Thing
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Hrmph. The problem with an index post is that then you can forget to update it…

9 Likes
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The Universal Robot (Assembled By Hex)

by Agnieszka Trzaska

If you’ve played Plasmorphosis, you know what you’re getting into here (or either of the Rosalinda games, but Plasmorphosis is sci-fi like Universal Robot).

A short, silly (or not so silly) sci-fi romp where your boss has ordered you to assemble and train a robot so he can fire you (out the airlock). Find items, combine items, use items to solve puzzles.

I had a lot of fun with this one. It has a little bit of a split personality; it’s listed as “short” but while I immediately got the “give up” ending and the “do the expected thing” ending in about 20 minutes… it then tells you that there are TWELVE endings total, and finding those probably turns this into a two hour game.

Which is my only real quibble with this game: that’s too much time to spend with it for how much story is here. And even if you’re keeping a bunch of save states, it still gets tedious to try possibilities and it really starts highlighting how clicky the interface is. And I kinda wish the game had left me to my own devices to think up clever things to try and decide when I’m done exploring rather than triggering my completionist “Well of course I want to see all the endings!”

But also the game deserves more time than only the obvious two endings, so… it needs something to suggest that there are other possibilities. I’m not sure what.

9 Likes
3

Enigmart

by Sarah Willson

I gave up on this game three times before I got past the initial tutorial puzzle. Fortunately, that was (for me) by far the most inscrutable puzzle-hunt-style “I don’t have the slightest clue what I’m supposed to be doing here” of the puzzles that I solved. Once I got past that gate I had fun. I was able to solve every puzzle that I tried, and after maybe 15 or 18 of the 26 puzzles I turned to the solution sheet to zip through and see where the story was going to end.

I did find that the frame story (“The most important thing is the milk. Just get in and get out.”) was directly in opposition to the game play (solve every puzzle for lots of other items) and made me care less about both the characters and the puzzles (because I’m not supposed to be solving these puzzles, I just need the milk, how do I get milk?). If it hadn’t been very clear that this was where the story was going I would have been pretty annoyed to be told at the end that oh no, you forgot the milk because no I didn’t, not for a minute.

But that was minor. The writing was fun and the story did what it needed to do.

But getting to that point… I completely missed the ONE word that’s supposed to give you a clue about what type of puzzle this was. I sat staring at the first puzzle (which locks off your entry into the rest of the game; after this you can solve puzzles in whatever order you want) for a long time and couldn’t come up with anything. Mice might never fit {something} your shrew zoo {something} {something}?? (I still want to see the puzzle that that answer goes to; it sounds far more interesting than the actual answer).

So I pulled up the source text (I don’t know why this is the first thing I thought of; maybe because View Source is just a Control+U away?) and the answer didn’t tell me anything either. And then there’s a hint in the answer checker that another word is close, but you want the transformed version of that word and that didn’t help either.

OK, there’s probably a walkthrough in the extras/ folder. Well, there is, but it’s just a list of the solutions, and I already know that; it didn’t help.

OK, I’m being stupid, it said something in the “about this game” section about enabling hints. So I clicked that, and it just refreshed the page and all the text (that I could see without scrolling) was exactly the same so… I guess it didn’t do anything? Oh well, maybe it turned the hints on and they’ll show up in the game.

So I start the game again and… no hint. Well, it said there are hints “for puzzles that are difficult for any reason” there are hints, so maybe this one is supposed to be so easy that no one should need a hint? Maybe this game is just way too hard for me and I should just give up?

I set the game down for about two hours, but then decided to try again. This time I noticed that the About this game page does change, just… below the bottom of my screen so I had to scroll down to see it. For […] the hint system, click on the space after “Puzzles solved” at the bottom of any puzzle page.. So I went to the puzzle and tried clicking all the blank space at the bottom of the page …nothing. OK, let me stare at this puzzle a little longer. And then I was using keyboard navigation to tab through the links and… oh. When you say “the space after” you mean “the single space character” and not “the blank space generally to the right of”.

So then I got it. But I suspect that if I hadn’t already seen the extra hint from the source code, even the hint wouldn’t have been enough for me. So…for that first puzzle:

  • It may help to count how many words are in the puzzle. (the built-in hint)

  • There’s a word in the preceding text that is a further hint.

  • Let the countdown to savings begin!

  • Numbers from nine down to zero, but each with one letter altered, so zero becomes hero. (full solution)

Fortunately all the other puzzles I tried were much less opaque and I mostly had a pretty good guess of what to try for all the ones that I attempted. Definitely recommend if you like puzzles (mostly word puzzles) with a slightly-dystopian grocery-store story wrapped around them.

13 Likes
Lucian's Spring Thing 2026 Reviews (latest: meminerimus)
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The Coffee Cake Caper

by Darius Foo

Hey look, a game that’s NOT mostly about a corporate dystopia. I guess this is this year’s mystery-at-a-carnival game - this time with 100% fewer murders.

Maybe I’m just bad at puzzles today; I am kinda under the weather. I pretty much just followed the walkthrough for this one. I’m not sure I would have gotten most of the deductions by myself. (also the solution/walkthrough is slightly wrong about the first accusation: it’s a costume, not a uniform).

Actually, maybe I would have gotten some of them. But it feels pretty overwhelming when your first accusation is: You are lying about where/why/how/when you/Edwina/Diffany/Cornie/Barnaby went/took/ate/got/stole the rainbow frosting/blanket/dough/coffee cake/oversized baking pan/uniform/garbage truck/dark circles/phone/home/competition/pretty dress/car/photograph/stomachache/snow/paper baking cups/shift schedule/costume. And then to make it stick you have to pick What you ate and Why and three pieces of How I know evidence each from that list of nouns (and for some reason it seems like the order of the nouns is randomized in each dropdown? They’re not alphabetical, and they’re not the same as each other). And it looks like you need to get all five of those correct to continue. And most of them were mentioned only once in the 6K word story you’ve read so far.

So this is one to approach when you’re ready to dig into mountains of interviews to find which piece goes where. Wish I’d set it aside to come back to when I was in more of a deductive mood.

I do think the pacing could have been better: that initial huge infodump and then you keep having to scroll back and pull pieces out of it and fit them into the new bits you get every time you successfully accuse someone. And it was a little odd that it started with the very silly very over-the-top pompous Georgian-era origin of the detective’s society and pops to “the present day” and a cozy mystery and does nothing with the secret society until sending you a judgy letter after you’ve wrapped up the case. It was fine, just an odd contrast that I don’t think it really needed.

And it was maybe a little bit too much “we’re going to use every piece of evidence exactly once and involve every suspect in some way that they don’t want to admit” for my taste, but that was appropriate enough for this kind of game, so eh.

Dunno. It seemed fun! I just wasn’t quite up to attempting the deductions properly given how intimidating they seemed at first glance. I’ll be curious to hear how other people get on with it. It may just be more of an “oh, you need two pieces of evidence for this one, what’s the thing I’m missing?” deal and it’s obvious that they’re correct once you sort them out of the story.

Looks like it’s using a custom engine written in OCaml and it worked pretty well for me. I did wish that it would have left the choices at the bottom so I could see more of the scrollback, instead of scrolling them to be roughly vertically centered, but otherwise…

Edit: Oh, and apparently you can restart the game without using browser dev tools to delete the game data - according to the itch page you tap/click the (completely unmarked) first mention of Quibblebottom 5 times. Uh. That could have just been a “Restart” button, but sure, why not?

10 Likes
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Strings: a (bug)folk song

by Tabitha and baezil

Like the previous Warden: a (bug)folk horror this is short and charming.

After many adventures, you stand before the legendary Spring Stage; tonight, you
plan to play the music that will call the last full moon of spring out of the sky. She’s
already rising, a day moon. It’s time to string your bugdolin and find the four
master musicians before nightfall.

I’m not sure what to say about this; it was fun. Unlike the previous game, it’s not horror, although you’re a bugfolk, you can get eaten gruesomely by a variety of creatures.

There are 12 achievements of which I’ve only found five or six (I got taterbug friend once but now I’m not sure how). You will want to type commands at the beginning because as a bugfolk bard you do have some unconventional core commands.

It has a bunch of nice little touches – the time of day changes as you convince more musicians to join you. Your bugdolin gets dirty and most of the people you talk to will call you on it if you’re not taking proper care of it.

Good stuff; go play it?

11 Likes
Lucian's Spring Thing 2026 Reviews (latest: meminerimus)
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Fantasy Opera: Theater of Memory

by Lamp Post Projects

At a new opera house, all the performers are having dreams which, while not necessarily nightmares, are intense enough to interrupt their sleep and impair their ability to work; you’ve been hired to investigate the situation.

While this is fully standalone, Fantasy Opera: Mischief at the Masquerade was the only one of Nell’s three (!) IFComp games that I played, so it was fun to be able to compare directly to its predecessor. This felt like a step up in every way.

The historical details felt more integrated into the story; there were a few didactic moments but much less than Mischief’s constant “here, let me infodump at you” (yes, thank you, I do know what a cornetto is, get out of my face). The prose still consistently has just a little of the same superficiality though. It does have things to say but says them all out loud, where a novel might leave a lot more of it to subtext. It’s a thing you see a lot in fanfic writers, or in new novelists and short story writers, people who haven’t learned to trust their readers yet. But this is otherwise very competently written so I have to wonder if it’s a deliberate stylistic choice? I don’t know. It’s not blatant, and a lot of video game writing is intentionally up front about things. But personally I don’t love it here.

The investigation felt smoother here too, and I thought the epilogue did a good job of explaining the things that you failed to guess correctly. It was more stuff than I was willing to memorize, so placing the performers correctly was a lot of flipping back and forth between sections, but it was great that all the information was still available in the interface.

I wish the die rolls had been explained a little more, but the extra info felt like bonuses rather than necessities so it wasn’t a big deal. If I’m reading it right, you get to choose two out of three from Architecture, Magic, and Music: one of them you’re good at and have a 50% chance, one you’re OK at and have a 25% chance, and the final one you are locked out of. Similarly you choose Charm vs. Observation, 50% for one and 25% for the other.

The wrap-up choice of “who’s with you? Your partner, or this co-worker or that co-worker?” was a bit jarring since I don’t think any of them were mentioned anywhere else in the game, but otherwise that final section fit much better than_Mischief’s_ “here, have a romance game tacked onto the end of your game.”

What else? I also appreciated that the image filesizes weren’t huge: the whole thing is, what, 8 or 9 MB? It’s always nice when I don’t have to waste download time and storage space on the non-text parts that I don’t care about.

Another lovely investigation; I had a good time.

10 Likes
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Cyclic Fruition Number One

by D E Haynes

This fell in a middle ground where it didn’t really grab me, and I wished it had leaned more into something.

I tend to think the Winograd/Flores inspired conversation state diagram that it’s built around is overly-complicated and hard to follow, and the slight surrealism (?) obfuscates it even further. But then the weirdness felt like it was just for the sake of weirdness rather than having much purpose or much to say, so that wasn’t very satisfying either. And the looping around felt like it was just filling out parts of the diagram, rather than an experiment in evoking some sort of… something through loopy Twine poetry.

It felt just a little underbaked in ways that triggered my “the emperor has no clothes” response pretty hard. Like the passage where the dialogue was a stanza from each of our ABC characters, and the first and third were reasonable approximations of what, iambic tetrameter? And the second’s meter seemed to be designed to be as awkward as possible to read aloud. That had to be an intentional bit, right? But I don’t know why it’s interesting or particularly funny.

Dunno. It wasn’t bad; it was fun to loop through several times. But it didn’t feel meaningful enough for me to think it was worth the unnecessarily confusing presentation of a sci-fi (?) vignette that didn’t really go anywhere.

8 Likes
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23 Minutes

by George Larkwright

Oof. I am so the wrong audience for this one. Growing up being always involved with babies and kids (oldest of 5 children, all boys; near the beginning of… 24 grandchildren, two-thirds boys), it has always been difficult for me to see “dad games” as more than a depressing commentary on the narrowness of who gets to make games. And then one of Keza MacDonald’s podcasts reinforced that. What was that called? Spawnpoint? Extra Life?

And this is definitely no exception. But let’s try to look at it for itself…

It’s a poem set to a turn-based silent movie. A blurred walk to work in the early morning. No choices: click or press space to reveal the next line. As a reader, I might have preferred revealing stanzas instead of lines, but that wouldn’t have evoked footfalls as well.

The poem is set in three… not columns, since they overlap, but… alignments? Left/center/right. I thought that was used to good effect, both for interleaving competing lines of thought, and just for movement.

I thought it got saggy toward the middle and end. More of a story, less poetry. More overplaying its hand; piling on making excuses for explaining the protagonist rather than being exhausted early-morning thoughts. I think the ending was supposed to be looking up but it just felt like another excuse to me.

Broccoli was an amusing recurring motif:

Wipe the debris from my eyes
crunchy
like the tips
of oven-baked broccoli

Yeah. Dunno. I thought it did a pretty good job of what it was trying to do, but it also made most of its point in the first quarter or third and then kept going.

6 Likes
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Exchange Demo

by Peter Johnston

This one’s writing goes the other way from Theater of Memory: leans a little too much into not explaining itself. Mostly in the common sci-fi way of “we’re going to make up a bunch of terminology,” but the small-scale choice design varies wildly (unsignaled) which adds to that feel.

The game opens on a choice with no explanation:

  • Tink
  • Vrnnt

…and it turns out that this selects which of the two characters you’ll be playing as for the remainder of the chapter. But unless you replay, you have no idea what you just selected, or even that there ARE two potentially-playable characters.

I consistently had trouble telling whether a choice was going to lead to the same place or do something dramatically unexpected (and I was wrong in both directions). I don’t think any of the choices that immediately merged were interesting reflective choices, and some of them were awkward transitions for at least one of the choices. And that “never knowing what level of intensity to expect from this choice” felt kinda zany and slapstick (did you need to use the bathroom? // no, I already went // aaaah you have to go sooo bad!!!) which was at odds with… is this trying to get you to think seriously about some things?

And some of the choices were more interesting when you’ve played it several times and realize, for instance, that the last choice is always a cliff-hanger: whatever you choose, it turns out that the other character has done the other thing. But there’s no way to know that without playing it several times; the writing doesn’t even hint at the roads-not-taken. That’s a tricky line to walk, of course, but…

And it tried to hook the reader with things that don’t work for me; jumping into a high-stakes situation when I don’t know if I give a hill of beans about either of these characters. Yeah, don’t care.

I’d still be curious to learn more about some of the things that were mentioned, but I’m not sure the ones I’m curious about are where this story is going.

5 Likes
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Maybe you’ll respect this dead person instead

by Ellric Smith

The first passage of this had me worried: a couple sentences that took me a second or a third look to parse, a couple sentences or phrases that didn’t follow well, a bit of maybe over-description, a choice that… well, how should I know? Guess I’ll pick randomly. But it was fun! A little rough around the edges, but intriguing.

You are a summoner with remains from four… people: a fairy general, a giant, a giant crab, and… I’m not sure what the deal with Cathareen Stulka, the Beautiful and Mighty is, other than the narrator. Navigate a short adventure and summon the appropriate spirit (or an appropriate spirit) at the appropriate times. Seems fairly forgiving but keeps the action going well.

I’d enjoy seeing more of this world and these characters.

Edit: Mike Russo used “anime” to describe this, and I think that’s a good word: it’s definitely a little extra, though not quite to “a goatherd named Leofrick the Seditious hears the voice of a flaming mare who was defecating while standing in a shaft of moonlight on a hilltop” levels (Annals of the Parrigues, pg. 95). (also I had to backtrack on the following paragraph to get the meaning when I realized “falls” wasn’t a verb)

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. You take a moment to breathe, and enjoy the cool wind on your back as it rustles through the grass, bringing with it a smell of petrichor.

6 Likes
11

meminerimus

by diluculum

A short horror vignette, basically hypertext in parser form, with a pretty presentation in the web version.

Latin, huh? Meminerimus is future perfect, so something like “to have remembered”? Memorialized? And the author name diluculum is “daybreak”-ish?

My biggest impression is that this is a static image. There’s no motion here, no daybreak, no dawning of realization whatsoever from the abusive parent. Which, tbf, is part of the horror here. But it left me a little flat, even for something this short.

Encouraging you (a couple levels down in the nested help/about commands) to use z to wait, and then having multiple levels of “this is definitely not going to do anything” response messages was a nice touch.

7 Likes
12

The Missing City Council

by Solarius

Ha! I made it through without a walkthrough. What a wild ride of a game. So underimplemented in most places (you can take city hall but not fight city hall, the Register Office door leaks some of the default locked descriptions and is totally not described as sticky when it’s only using locked as a mechanical shorthand for “the door is stuck, give it a shove” - gosh, that last took me forever to figure out) but then over-implemented in others (the scanner won’t turn on unless there’s something on it, and then your cup of hot tea cools down after… 12 turns? And the Earl Grey tea in the cup seems to have no user-facing name, presumably in an effort to avoid colliding with the box of tea? Which… doesn’t seem to be necessary at all, except maybe that it clues that you want the lemon drop).

And then there’s the bonkers plot where King George V apparently tries to invade Finland, gets caught in a magnetic storm and time-travels 108 years forward… which you only find out at the very end… I have no idea why this arbitrary piece from the Met is apparently in a sauna in Finland, only someone took it out of the box and used it to lock the door to the sauna on the other artworks? Did the council steal the artwork? Why? Did George go on an international art theft spree while time-travelling? Who knows? Cool cool.

Also a sauna seems like a terrible place to store delicate artworks: I was thinking at first that well, maybe the sauna isn’t in use? But if it melted one of Félix González-Torres’s Untitled installations into a somewhat solid block of candies, then it’s obviously at least hot in there if not wet (aside: I think that was my favorite puzzle of the game, I definitely laughed at that one).

Very creative and wacky, but unfortunately an untested mess.

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Woah! HOW did you work out that computer/scanner puzzle without a walkthrough?

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Hah, I’m impressed but for different reasons - I was able to suss out the scanner puzzle on my own, but never would have figured out the door-pushing or art-hitting on my own. Either way, kudos Josh!

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Heh, that one was more accidental but less difficult? I had no idea why I would want to scan something but it seemed like the thing to do so I put the logbook on the scanner and then… not type, not use, not scan, hmm, what common parser verbs… oh, maybe I could turn the computer on? The longest stuck part was turning the scanner on too. And then by that point I was used to the part where you don’t get objects’ state when you examine them, but you do in the room description, and I was pretty sure that I was supposed to be making tea with a laxative for the guards. Why is castor oil dripping out of the WWI fighter plane? We may never know.

Yeah, the Register Office door was the biggest barrier. I happened to know that the audience taking pieces of candy was part of the intent of the original art piece, so that seemed like a thing to try, but they’re mostly melted together: maybe I can break one off?

The tiny indication that finally got me there with the door was realizing that there was a different error message: not “the cup doesn’t fit the lock” but “you can’t unlock that” which made me wonder if maybe it was locked but not unlockable and the author was using the locked status for something that wasn’t actually the door being locked, and the locked status leaking through is under-implementation… but that was a very “how do you think when you’re programming a game?” kind of deduction. Once I FINALLY had that thought it wasn’t too much of a stretch to go well, what else could it be; oh, maybe it’s just supposed to be stuck; kick door, hit door, push door.

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@JoshGrams Thanks so much for taking the time to play Exchange and for your feedback. To your point about reflective choices, which ones didn’t work for you? And what was it about the characters that didn’t make you care for them? Was it the limited amount of time you spent with them, or that the choices you could make to define them within the world seemed too disparate from one another? I’m still trying to find my footing regarding the balance of moving the story forward and fleshing out the PCs, so any additional feedback you have there is more than welcome!

3 Likes
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Yeah, mostly that their dialogue was so disparate and disjointed: is Aloysius the 4th-richest CEO in the world, or is he the dude who can’t remember if he peed before leaving the house? Is he the whistleblower or a victim? Is Tasha the receptionist who’s been there long enough to poke fun at her boss, or the one who’s in her first week and doesn’t know how to take intake or control the volume on the intercom? Is Marquez the doctor in her fifth year of practice who’s tired of people thinking she doesn’t know what she’s doing, or the clueless beginner who’s like “aaah I shouldn’t have touched that, why did it break?!?!?!!” Why can I choose “brimming with possibilities” when she’s just going to be exhausted and cynical the rest of the chapter? Why does she seem to have no money when she’s charging 5 million whatever to get in the door? What time is it when Aloysius shows up and why is Marquez annoyed or relieved about it? Is he late? Is he early? Is she late?

I don’t know going in if any given choice is going to be a “yes, and” or a “no, because” or move on with no response at all.

It feels like the story is hiding all the real information from us about who these characters are: am I going to be rooting for Aloysius, or thinking “good riddance to bad rubbish,” or some combination of the two? And if you play three or four times so you know that the ending choice is a “gotcha, sucker!” one where whatever choice you make is the wrong one, then it feels even more like the story is only hiding stuff so it can pull the rug out from under you later.

And if I have no reason to trust the narrative, and no idea what it’s going to do with any given choice… I’m just clicking through randomly and not really caring.

6 Likes
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These notes are super helpful, thank you! While the intention of giving less detail was meant to give the player more space to make up their minds about the characters, it turns out that being less specific seems to leave the player in a no man’s land of “I don’t know enough about these people, it seems like they can change on a dime, and so then why would I care about them”. The overall goal is to give players flexibility in a relatively linear story (with acts 2 and 3 to come), but I hear you that there needs to be more consistent behavior after players have made personality choices for the character they’re following. This gives me a lot to work with, so thank you again!

5 Likes
19

Cryptid Hunter

by Adam Wade, Alex Kutza, Skye Murrell

I hung out with the Seattle/Tacoma IF group while they played through this, and also the Oxford/London IF group. Examine six different locations and pick which three cryptids you think are the “legendary” ones that you’re supposed to capture. You had three vague descriptive terms for each cryptid on your shopping list, and these felt like the right amount of vagueness and the right amount of “this description could match a couple different cryptids that we’ve seen.”

But… the tags claim it’s “highly replayable” and I feel like they didn’t do the math on that? With a group it was fun to see it twice because people had different reactions to various things. But if you’re playing it by yourself? You should only play this once.

The locations and the cryptids which live in each one are static; you get the exact same world to explore each time. The only thing that changes is which ones you’re looking for. So… on the face of things, if you capture three cryptids one time, then there are only three more that you haven’t captured. At most you could only play it twice with completely separate clues.

But they don’t do that: I’m pretty sure they just give you a random set of three. So… (6*5*4) / (3*2*1) is 20 possible sets of three cryptids. On your second game:

  • One is the set you just saw.
  • One is the set you haven’t seen.
  • The other 18 are split evenly: 9 sets where you’ve seen one, 9 sets where you’ve already seen two.

So even if you only play twice, there’s a 95% chance that you’ll know at least one of the answers the second time, and a 50% chance that you’ll know at least two of them.

On the other hand, adding the randomization is a pretty significant chunk of work for a game that someone is only going to play once. So that’s a tough call for the authors. Yay for the birthday paradox!

Edit: oh, DemonApologist has already pointed this out. Yup.

8 Likes
20

I played a bunch more but haven’t been reviewing. I think the only ones I haven’t played yet are Our Lady of Thorns and Social Democracy: Popular Front. So here are a bunch of quick thoughts:

A Quiet Scurry, by Moss & Quill Studios

This was short and well-done, I thought. Once you realize that it’s one deadly choice, one safe choice, and one risky choice, it becomes pretty clear which is which, but on your first playthrough there’s plenty of room to debate which choice to take. Less gory than I thought it might have been, the deaths are all kinda fade-to-black, I think.

Unseelie, by Alun Clewe

This one lands in an oddly similar place to The Missing City Council for me: it was rough to get started with (though not anywhere near as confounding as TMCC, and mainly because I skipped the dark pit initially and then forgot to go back to it) but a wacky enough plot that I was more entertained than I might otherwise have been. I’d be curious to see more of this.

Before the Snow Melts, by Zach Crowe

As with many VNs, the facial expressions were way over the top for what the text was implying, which I find a little off-putting (and then sometimes they don’t react when I would have liked to have a different expression). And the way the characters were written felt quite a bit younger than they were actually supposed to be? But this was a nice enough melancholy ramble.

The House, by Miles Poehler

I was having fun with this one, but then on a second playthrough to see the other characters… the treatment of Jess feels… yeah. That’s unfortunate. Otherwise it was wacky and fun, if fairly fluffy.

Latinorum, by Roberto Ceccarelli

I almost didn’t play this one, as Espresso Moka was just frustrating and annoying for me, but I actually liked this better. Lots of red herrings in the form of objects that are there only because they’d be there in real life is more fun for me than “let’s take a trivial task and make it frustrating by putting all sorts of arbitrary obstacles in the way,” I guess. I did struggle a little bit with the two-word parser in a couple places, but not too badly.

Crier, by Antemaion

Dunno. I personally liked Saltwrack a lot better, but this did have a bunch of fun writing and I liked the character art. I’m usually looking at the text, so when VNs have the expressions change it’s too far away from where I’m looking so I tend to miss it a lot and then go “wait, what did it look like before and how is it different?” but having the larger static characters moving around here was much more visible out of the corner of my eye. And having the full character attribution for each line in text right there was nice too (sometimes it’s just one character comes “forward” slightly and I always find that hard to read). Anyway. Phenol Red’s voice was a little bit much of a clash with the rest for my taste, but otherwise I liked the balance that the writing struck of being weird in different ways.

The Perilous Plot, by Carrie Berg

The premise of this was very entertaining but the “plot” events are so sparse that I just went and glared the heroes down, which was kinda boring and repetitive, even though the individual bits of writing worked well for me? I played through a couple times trying to figure out how to win by plot points but didn’t really figure anything out. Finally dug into the source code a bit (which wow, it’s a lot) and I’m still not sure, but I think each item is hidden in a particular location (and is only usable in particular locations, and sometimes only in particular weather) so with alllll the possible combinations it seems like you would have to play it a LOT of times and take notes on where you found things and where they worked before you’d be able to play what seems like probably the most interesting part of the game.

And things like… it tells you that if you glare in a room with a mirror, it works better, but I’m pretty sure a mirror is never mentioned in the rooms where mirrors supposedly exist (which according to the source code seems to be the Attic in five of the ten weathers, the Bedroom in five weathers, then the Cloudy Lakeshore, the Moonlit Bridge, the Moonlit Grand Staircase, the Drawing Room under the New Moon, and the Sunny Garden – how are you supposed to know that?)

So… I don’t know. I love the idea, I enjoyed the writing, but the interesting bits of gameplay seem so spread out and so hidden that I’m not sure how you’d have a very interesting play experience.

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