Lucian's Spring Thing 2026 Reviews (latest: The Missing City Council; A Quiet Scurry)

Competitions Spring Thing
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It’s time for Spring Thing 2026! And I am VERY MUCH NOT OBJECTIVE about these games this year, because I’ve gotten to know Autumn and Sarah more these last few years, and Sarah even beta-tested my Iron ChIF game, and, oh yeah, MY SON also has an entry. (The conversation at my house: Me: "Kid! You should find a comp and enter a game! I just finished Iron ChIF and had forgotten how much fun it was!’ Ellric: “OK, fine, what’s coming up?” Me: “Well, hmm, Spring Thing is probably next, let’s see, oh look the deadline to sign up is today.” Ellric: “…sure, why not.”)

Several brainstorming walks, a lot of writing, and one late-night sprint where I was recruited to convert his Google Doc into Twine later, “Maybe you’ll respect this dead person instead” is now a reality. It’s the first game he’s ever released! I am inordinately proud and pleased.

But obviously not super objective. So I won’t be reviewing his game, but in the spirit of ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’, I will try to review as many of the others as I can. I pulled down the whole list (both main and ‘back garden’) and randomized it, which is the One True Way to play and review games in a comp. So here we go!

  • Latinorum, by Roberto Ceccarelli
  • Strings: a (bug)folk song, by Tabitha & baezil
  • Cyclic Fruition Number One, by D E Haynes
  • The House, by Miles Poehler
  • The Missing City Council, by Solarius
  • A Quiet Scurry, by Moss & Quill Studios
  • The Universal Robot (Assembled By Hex), by Agnieszka Trzaska
  • Crier, by Antemaion
  • Exchange, by Peter Johnston
  • Unseelie, by Alun Clewe
  • Enigmart, by Sarah Willson
  • 23 Minutes, by George Larkwright
  • Fantasy Opera: The Theater of Memory, by Lamp Post Projects
  • meminerimus, by diluculum
  • Join the Swarm, by Senica Thing
  • Our Lady of Thorns, by Joel Burton
  • Before the Snow Melts, by Zach Crowe
  • The Perilous Plot, by Carrie Berg
  • Cryptid Hunter, by Adam Wade, Alex Kutza, Skye Murrell
  • Social Democracy: Popular Front, by Autumn Chen
  • The Coffee Cake Caper, by Darius Foo
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Latinorum
by Roberto Ceccarelli

The salient features of this game are “copyright © 1985,2026”, “A Commodore 64 retro adventure”, and, from the author’s notes, “Playing “Latinorum” took me back to my high school days, the setting for the story, which was inspired by real events (later reworked in the game).”

Either you want to play this game, or you don’t.

I enjoyed it! It’s exactly what it says on the tin: a very limited custom parser game set in the author’s high school. There are a billion modern conveniences that it doesn’t have, but it was designed to its own limitations, so it still works. The majority of the descriptions take up exactly one ‘screen’ of text, which somehow felt satisfying; none of the puzzles felt like I was groping for the right verb. Well, OK, one puzzle did: at one point, there’s a latched door, and you’re told you could unlock it with something thin and flexible. ‘Aha!’ I thought; ‘this is what the >INSERT verb is for!’ But no: you just type >OPEN DOOR when you’re holding the correct thing.

Did the author have something to say? “Hey, remember 1985?”
Did I have something to do? Browse someone else’s memories of not liking Latin but knowing an awful lot of it. And solve some puzzles.

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@lpsmith it’s a pleasant surprise and a great honor to be your first review on Spring Thing.
I’m glad you enjoyed my little old story.
The story originated on my computer back then, and I wanted it to stay there. I rewrote the parser using all the modern commodities available (Visual Studio, C#, .NET 10, and other tools), but in the end, it had to be a BASIC program, that extremely limited Commodore 64 BASIC.

It seems I succeeded.

Speaking of Latin: I got a 7 in Latin and a 6 in Italian.

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It was a great game to start off the comp with! I didn’t even say anything about the impressive coding achievement it was, since that’s kind of a separate axis than ‘how does it work as a game’, but it was, indeed, impressive.

It did make me wonder how difficult Latin would be to someone whose native language is (arguably?) the closest modern language to Latin that we have. I learned a little bit of Latin in college, and any time a Latin word was the root of an English word, it was a godsend. But maybe when 90% of the words are similar, remembering the differences becomes difficult?

I suppose the upshot is ‘kids in high school will always rebel against learning things’ :wink:

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There’s not only the closeness, but also the environment. One where Latin inscriptions are even still added, in the XXVIIIth century a.u.c. (since the Foundation of Rome). Enough Latin texts to read on the road, literally.

this is one of the youngest:

immagine
immagine474×454 66.5 KB

21 Marzo 2025 AD, 2778 dalla Fondazione dell’ Urbe.

I leave the translation as exercise for the reader :smiley:

Ave atque Vale,
Dott. Piergiorgio.

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Strings: a (bug)folk song
by Tabitha & baezil

I ended up having a yay-argh-yay relationship to this game, and it all came down to ‘not typing ABOUT’. The premise was delightful! I’m a bug-bard, getting a band together to call the last full moon of spring from the sky. You have a ‘bugdolin’! You touch stuff with your antennae! The dangers are things like a sparrow or a frog! Come on, you can’t help but be charmed by all this.

And then I got stuck (at the maze) and nothing I tried seemed to work. And I won’t belabor the whole sad tale (a Transcript is available if you’re a) the authors or b) morbidly curious), but it all boiled down to the fact that there were special verbs implemented that Did The Thing I Was Trying To Do, and because those verbs were there, neither the authors nor their testers thought to try other ways of phrasing Those Things. And I eventually discovered (thanks to an aside in Josh’s review of this game) that in the ABOUT text, you’re told there’s a COMMANDS option to list all the special verbs. Once I knew that, things were straightforward again! I could interact with the game as designed, and things flowed naturally. I eventually twigged to the central conceit of the piece (again, fairly telegraphed in COMMANDS, but somewhat opaque otherwise), and the rest of the game flowed smoothly.

Happily, there’s a very simple fix for this: just mention COMMANDS in the intro, instead of just the ABOUT! And emphasize that it’s critical for playing the game. And then the more complicated fix is to also implement responses for things I tried like >TURN PEG and >PLAY ONE STRING; even if it’s just telling the player what command to use instead.

On a personal note, having recently immersed myself in I7, it was actually kind of charming to find small bugs here and there and be able to comment >[‘LAST CHECK’ NOT ‘CHECK’], or, >[MOVE THE PLAYER AFTER THE CUT SCENE, NOT BEFORE]. I know what’s going on! I can help! Woo!

At any rate, by the end of the game, all was forgiven. I loved the setting, I loved the characters, I loved solving problems with music. I admit to a little bit of confusion about the >LORE, but nothing an ‘OK, sure, why not?’ couldn’t cure.

Did the author have anything to say? I may be tuned into this more in my current state of mind, having recently wrote a game where I very much had something to say about how life works, but I could feel the philosophy of the game seeping through the cracks, and I really appreciated it. It had to do with appreciating life, appreciating music, and the role of empathy in a life well lived. And the negative consequences of one of the two endings just delighted me in how they paled in comparison to the positive consequences, especially in a ‘folk tale’ like this. What does it matter if the very rhythms of all of nature are thrown in disarray? You got to spend time with your love, and it means you’ll have a new adventure to go on next to fix things again!
Did I have something to do? Be delighted, frustrated, and then delighted again. Solving the puzzles was quite satisfying, both in an ‘I know what to do!’ sense, but also in a ‘I get to read some cool text as a result!’ sense.

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Cyclic Fruition Number One
D E Haynes

“Railway stations age like old words. With every repetition we precipitate new meaning.”

That’s the first line of this work. It sounded evocative! And then I re-read it a few times, and decided it did not actually make any sense.

Which means we’re in one of those, I dunno, vibe games? Where the point of the game lies somewhere beyond literal meaning, and you have to sort of intuit your way forward.

Or, because you’re me, the whole thing escapes you and you just try to be methodical instead, because I am, at my heart, a pragmatic person, and while I have at least a vague appreciation for the metaphorical/metaphysical/philosophical/abstruse/random, it’s not particularly my mode.

I clicked on things a lot, ended up seeing the same pages a lot, then differences started showing up, and it took me to a page entitled “Saved by the Junk DLC #1: Dialogue and Action” It seemed like an ending? I am calling it an ending. I am not particularly convinced it is an ending.

Did the author have anything to say? I cannot say! The evidence seems to point to ‘yes’?
Did I have something to do? Try to figure out the answer to the first question, and fail.

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Hi Lucian, thanks for taking the time to write this review. Would you mind editing your fifth paragraph to obscure what might be considered a spoiler please?

I’m very happy to answer any questions about this entry but I’m remaining aloof just now so as not to affect any of the reviews :smiley:

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Done! Whoops, sorry.

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The House
Miles Poehler

This game has a lot of energy and flash. It had the feeling for me of a game where the author had a bunch of ideas, and felt the need to get them all written out quickly before they slipped away. As a result, the final product has a bunch of typos and a serious lack of coherence, but that was never the point–the point was to have someone tell you, “Hey, you know what would be cool?” and then tell you a short story, and then two seconds later tell you, “Hey, you know what else would be cool?” and tell you a completely different short story. And they are, indeed, cool ideas! Some of them landed for me better than others, simply due to my personal preferences in story make-up (I’m not super into epic tragedy/angst, both of which are key points of a couple of the stories) but none overstay their welcome.

I appreciated the fact that there were eight total characters of which you got to pick four for any given playthrough, meaning you could get the basics from exactly two playthroughs. But there was extra material for even more playthroughs, so if you really were taken with one of the characters, you could go back and enjoy a bit more of their interactions with each other. But at the same time, I didn’t feel anything was lost by not going back for that? I appreciated that bit of game design, as well.

Did the author have anything to say? “Hey, guess what?”
Did I have something to do? This is probably the weakest part of the design–there was literally no meaningful choice ever in the entire game, other than ‘which story do you want to hear?’

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The Missing City Council
Solarius

My expectations for this game were calibrated in the very first room. In the room description, it says ‘You can see a City Hall here.’ ‘A city hall?’ I thought. ‘Maybe…’

>GET CITY HALL
Taken.

[cue giggling.]

Look. It is not the first nor the last time this particular bug has shown up in a .z5 game. I have coded that bug myself many times. The point is that it put me in the right mode to not get upset when, for example:

Office of the Mayor
An office with a desk.

You can see a fluffy mat here.

> x desk
Sorry, I don’t understand what “desk” means.

OK, got it. At this point, I was happy to wander around and Only Do Obvious Things, and when I ran out of that, I turned to the walkthrough, which turned out to be a good idea; it turns out that what was obvious to me and what was obvious to the author were very very different.

There were some interesting ideas here, and as all the other reviews are saying, it could use some more implementation and feedback to the hapless player. But, as the author says “You’ve got to start somewhere, right?” Indeed, Solarius. Indeed.

Did the author have anything to say? “You’ve got to start somewhere, right?”
Did I have something to do? Giggle about carrying around the city hall literally every time I took inventory. I have very basic needs.

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A Quiet Scurry
Moss & Quill Studios

Reading the opening of this story, I was suddenly struck with the memory of my dad reading me ‘The Whispering Rabbit’ by Margaret Wise Brown. It’s a cute story about a rabbit who swallows a bee that falls asleep, and the rabbit has to figure out how to wake it up so it’ll fly away again. And the rabbit can only whisper, so when you read it to your kid, you have to whisper, too. As it turns out, the rabbit in that story dies a lot less often than our fearful protagonist mouse in this game, but something about the generally pastoral setting resonated. I felt like whispering when I played it, and despite the many tragic deaths lurking behind many clicks, it was just… nice to feel small. Like your troubles are large for you, but small for the world. The writing was focused, deliberate, and evocative. Sometimes that’s kind of what you need. OK, time for bed, kid. I love you.

Did the author have anything to say? ‘Here, be a mouse for a little bit.’
Did I have something to do? Replay the game multiple times, first to try to avoid dying, then to see how else I could die, then to see how else I could curl up for the night at the end.

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