PB Parjeter's Spring Thing 2025 Reviews

[pbparjeter]

Marbles, D, and the Sinister Spotlight by @kamineko (Drew Cook)

I’m going to write some Spring Things again this year, time permitting. Hopefully this thread doesn’t end up with just one or two reviews.

The Story

Marbles has a simple story: you’re a cat, and you’re investigating some sort of creature at a stage show alongside your human owner, D.

D is just the secondary protagonist. For gameplay purposes, you are strictly working from the perspective of Marbles the cat. I really like the way she is written: she’s conceited, but she’s also ignorant of human things and willing to gloss over that.

Just as important as those two characters is the one that’s not in the title. The creature you’re trying to deal with is a grue from Zork.

I’ve never played that game, so the fact that this centers around one of its characters didn’t make a huge impact on me. I did recognize the name, though, and I know it’s not something you want to come across.

Marbles tries to balance feelings of slight terror but also compassion toward the creature. The writing gets the tone across effectively in its own right, but I can’t say exactly how effectively it does that in relation to the source material.

Gameplay

Onto the game mechanics. Since Marbles has you playing as a cat, you rarely manipulate objects directly. Instead, you direct D’s attention to them. (And later, you direct the other character in another way.)

In some ways, this approach to gameplay is straightforward, since it advances the plot significantly after each successful action. However, as the game progresses it asks you to negotiate some spaces and draw attention to objects in very specific ways. None of these have very strong conceptual links in their own right, IMO.

In other words, I think Marbles really demands the player to build up a mental space of how the stage/auditorium is laid out. If I had played with the pictures on, that might have helped, but only a few would work as useful diagrams.

In the end, the game isn’t terribly difficult, and it’s probably about as easy as the author intended. But I’d say that’s mostly due to the small map and limited number of objects. I think that the gameplay would quickly become complicated in a larger game.

I did check the hints a few times. Speaking of hints, this game does something smart: it only allows you to see hints for the part of the game that you’ve reached. So there’s no way to spoil things for yourself accidentally.

On top of all that, the game can be even more straightforward — it also gives you the option to read it as a linear story.

Themes

What is the game about? It’s a short story that touches on themes of family, empathy, being together with someone else, and knowing what they’re like. (Those things are all nicely contrasted with a setting in which the characters are alone).

As I said, I don’t know much about the source material, so I had to create my own premise for the plot. More specifically …

Based on the initial D, and based on the fact that Drew uses a cat in his profile picture, I couldn’t stop myself from assuming D is the author’s childhood self.
Maybe it’s him as a child daydreaming about both the thoughts of his cat.

That’s the premise that I made up in my head – since it’s the sort of way I imagined myself with fictional characters and animals as a kid. And even now, I guess.

But the game didn’t validate me whenever I accidentally typed “Drew,” and the character D is apparently from one of his earlier games.

So that may or may not be what he was going for.

Animal Player Characters

One more thing. A few of the games I’ve recently played have had animal PCs (or secondary PCs). During IF Comp, there was @draconis 's Miss Gosling, and I also played @CMG 's Toby’s Nose and @malacostraca’s free bird. at some point.

Broadly, animal PCs can serve as a basis for a unique gameplay style — a chance to reduce the number of actions that the player has to deal with while adding in extra considerations.

And apart from that … it’s just fun. Similar to Toby’s Nose, Marbles gives you a chance to freely act like a cat in ways not directly tied to the plot, which is fun. (I don’t think I tried in Miss Gosling since Watson the dog is the secondary character).

Anyway, in Marbles, you earn a score for being appropriately catlike. I’m not sure whether this actually affected the final outcome, but scoring oneself on performing properly feline actions seems in character for a self-concerned cat.

Come to think of it, there was also Octopus’ Garden last Spring Thing, which was enjoyable but probably didn’t fully realize the alien mindset of an octopus in its gameplay. I know there many others, but I don’t see a list on IFDB, so I’ll leave it at that.

[pbparjeter]

Elaine Marley and the Ghost Ship by @LoganDelaney

This is the first game I played during Spring Thing, but I’ve been revising this review because I think it deserves a pretty detailed analysis.

The Story

Ghost Ship is a Monkey Island fan game. It’s also a critical essay about the series and one of its central characters, Elaine Marley.

The plot is fairly bare-bones: Ghost Ship has the player solving a few simple puzzles to turn Elaine into a ghost. Once that happens, Elaine can accomplish her role in the original plot of the Monkey Island games.

Major spoiler: Ghost Ship literally ends with Elaine fading away.

It’s a pointed conclusion, and I’m pretty sure the author means for it to relate back to Ghost Ship’s overarching themes. The in-game author’s notes describe how Elaine has been overlooked or had her original characteristics erased throughout the Monkey Island series. That fits into the overall ‘ghost’ theme.

When I put it like that, Ghost Ship sounds like a shaggy dog story. Maybe it is — maybe it has to be since it’s a slice of an existing story — but it’s also a character piece. So let’s look at how that does the heavy lifting.

Characterization

In Ghost Ship, Elaine is portrayed through her interactions with a few other characters, but mostly through the narrative tone.

I was going to say that Ghost Ship leans on internet-era snark, with a little more venom than classic Monkey Island humor. I remember Elaine being indignant in context in the official games, not so much snarky for the sake of snark.

But after reading @SpaceTurtles’ review, I see that the exact dialogue choices are left up to the player. I guess the fact that I was put off by some of the snarkier options says more about me than the game.

There are also some concrete attempts to add depth to Elaine’s character. For example, in one key repeated scene, the author tries to portray Elaine as traumatized by LeChuck and as overcoming that trauma. That sort of weightiness would be out of place in the original Monkey Island, but this isn’t the original game, and I think it will be well received by the right audiences.

Ultimately, Elaine is a competent character with some edge, as she is in the games, so the slightly different tone works in the end.

Portraits of Elaine

The game also concerns itself with Elaine’s visual appearance. The author prefers Elaine’s original design and is very critical of the cartoonier designs. The cartoonier designs arguably correspond to poor characterization, with Elaine being reduced to a love interest in some of the later games.

Here’s everything side by side:

Notably, Elaine is portrayed as a black woman on the cover of Ghost Ship.

I like the new portrait for its own sake. Elaine looks good in her own right, and it works as a race-blind interpretation of the character. And above all, it made me want to play the game.

Usually there would be no need to say more than that. However, Ghost Ship is explicitly about Elaine’s appearance. Early on in the game, the author argues that a change to Elaine’s skin tone — a gradual shift from dark to light — is something that’s been taken from her over the course of the series.

But actually, it’s in some of the later games that Elaine has an olive skin tone relative to certain characters. In the first two games, most Monkey Island characters had exactly the same reddish skin tone as Elaine. In fact, most video game characters had that tone as well.

That’s because there were few viable options in the 16-bit EGA color palette. You can see a bunch of Monkey Island characters here, including one who was meant to have a darker skin tone.

It’s debatable whether Monkey Island handles race and culture well or not — how much of it is pirate clichés versus Caribbean etc. stereotypes? But I think it’s clear that some other characters in the series would provide a lot more substance in this area. Trying to apply it to Elaine seems like looking for a problem.

Game Design and Styles

Lastly, how does Ghost Ship play? It has a pretty ambitious design visually and functionally. It’s not perfect, but it’s original and it works.

In terms of function, you’ll interact with the game through an inventory, things that are sort of like contextual boxes, text that replaces itself on hover, images, and regular links. The game is split into chapters and author notes, all united through a main menu, with some repeated scenes sprinkled in.

This would make for a disjointed interface in a more complex game, but Ghost Ship has pretty simple puzzles and progression. I never got stuck or lost.

On the visual side, there’s a lot of font styling and a variety of page layouts. It’s usually appropriate and it sometimes looks good, especially the ectoplasmic green font used for ghost dialogue. Occasionally, some of the colors aren’t really visible against a black background. (The author has also apparently fixed some problems with automatic text, so that’s good.)

In the end, Ghost Ship is rough around the edges at times, but I’m glad that it was made since there are very few semi-documentary IF games like it.

Related Media

Anyone who’s interested in the meta-ness of Monkey Island that Ghost Ship builds on might be interested in this YouTube video.

In fact, you might want to watch it beforehand — I’m no expert on the series and it covers some stuff that is directly relevant to Ghost Ship. Knowing the things that video explained helped me get more out of the author’s notes.

I also wanted to mention a movie called The Cry of Granuaile. Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but I guess there is something about legendary, semi-forgotten pirates that invites this sort of metafictional roleplaying. The film goes into Spartacus-esque “we are all Granuaile” territory. Anyone who liked Ghost Ship would probably enjoy it.

The Cry of Granuaile (2022)

[pbparjeter]

The Goldilocks Principle @ilyu

This is a short game (less than 15 minutes long) that takes its central idea from Goldilocks and the Three Bears to examine eating disorders.

What It Is

Like some other Twine games, The Goldilocks Principle plays with choice and limited options.

Apart from advancing passages in a mostly linear way, the player mainly decides how triggering an episode is, based on a scale marked 1 to 5.

(The game uses the word “triggering” to describe the scale. But more accurately, maybe, it’s a scale of viscerality, since not all players are necessarily going to have a strong response to the subject matter. The writing is reasonably strong and definitely unrelenting, but I didn’t have a very strong response to it, probably due to my distance from the topic.)

Each of the five segments stands on its own, and each is very short, so I won’t comment too much on those. I did want to say that I thought the timed text was done well, contrary to @JoshGrams. This game overall is a good example of light styling and effects.

Anyway, the third choice, in the center of the range of options, makes it clear that it’s nigh-impossible to get things just right — subverting the Goldilocks lesson.

For the player, that means you’re not going to get a fully satisfying ending. For the author, presumably, it means eating disorders are something that you never sure you’ve full kept in check, though I don’t want to speak for them. But it’s a structure that allows for a bit of extra empathy between both author and reader, I think.

What It Isn’t

I also wanted to comment on what this game isn’t. I went into it expecting a full-fledged, dark parody of Goldilocks and the Three Bears centered around eating disorders.

Obviously, that’s partly because Goldilocks and the Three Bears is a children’s story. The cover art seemed to double down on that – it looks like children’s book illustrations, particularly the rough-line styles of Lauren Child, Quentin Blake, Andy Stanton, and the like.

On one hand, I’d like the author to have taken the risk of writing a full-fledged parable that really plays off the Goldilocks story and its characters.

On the other hand, this is clearly meant to be a somewhat minimalist game that gets its point across about a personal experience, then leave you with it. And the central mechanic holds it up pretty well – maybe even better than it would with a larger game.

[pbparjeter]

The Little Match Girl Approaches the Golden Firmament by Ryan Veeder (@Afterward )

I’ve played a few of Ryan Veeder’s games, but this is the first entry that I’ve played in his Little Matchstick Girl series.

The only thing I know about the series is based on what I’ve read in reviews — that these games are random and episodic. Combined with the sheer number of entries, I’ve kind of put them on my backlog indefinitely because they seem increasingly daunting.

So if The Golden Firmament didn’t have the time limit feature to set itself apart, I probably would have saved it for later with the rest.

Of course, I did play the game …

The Story In Short

Basically, you’re Hans Christan Andersen’s Little Matchstick Girl, aka Ebenezabeth Scrooge, and you’re trying to stop a team of mad scientists who are working to crack into a mysterious space artifact. They think it contains heaven, but in fact, it’s a sort of primordial life preserve.

The Golden Firmament is a bit like Ian Finley’s Babel and similar works in that it puts a sci-fi spin on religious and scientific ideas of hubris.

Veeder’s game relies much more on random humor, situations, and characters, though some of those are more thematically linked than at first glance.

Would it be better if it were more focused? I don’t know. The manic nature of the game means that commenting on anything would amount to mostly describing the jokes that I liked — which is a lot of them. So I’ll move onto how it played.

Approachable Difficulty Level

Before talking about the timer, I’ll touch on the puzzles and map.

I usually call myself bad at puzzles. While I rarely was confused by the puzzles here, I used the built-in hint function to solve a few (by typing ‘hint 2’). That worked pretty well.

There also seemed to be one point toward the end where the hint function gave me hints about the previous situation. It was close to the end, so it didn’t really matter.

More often, I lost myself in navigating the map. The layout started to make more sense toward the end, but I referred to @wolfbiter’s transcript to get through parts of the game.

How the Timer Works

This isn’t the only IF game to use real-time gameplay. However, I imagine that most others are brief games focused on delivering a short experience and replayability. Most aren’t ambitious enough to apply a countdown to a full-fledged, parser adventure game.

The Golden Firmament encourages you to set aside time for a full playthrough. At first glance, that means setting aside 30 minutes.

However, the game actually awards more time as you progress. So it will probably take longer than 30 minutes, but it will also be more forgiving than you expect — unless you spend all 30 minutes stuck in a single segment.

More importantly, the game gradually drifts away from the original time limit entirely. Sometimes, it puts you in timeless spaces. And toward the end, it puts you in a space with a shorter time limit (I had ~8 minutes). This serves to disorient the player – not just putting them in a different space, but under different time constraints.

What’s The Timer For?

That raises the question — what’s the intended effect of the timer?

A stripped-down version of the game can apparently be played without the timer — judging by the downloadable .gblorb version. On top of that, you can pause and even restore saves with the original time limit, which is a nice convenience but mostly a fallback for the player.

So the time limit basically exists to put pressure and relief on the player.

On one hand, I think that this pressure is enjoyable due to the manic nature of the game. In a heavier work, it would be more frustrating.

On the other hand, I think it would be better to make the importance of the timer entirely illusory. Making running out of time a ‘game over’ is a bit too much, IMO. (One point of comparison might be Chandler Groover’s The Bat, which had a money tally that seemed important and somewhat stressful, but which was ultimately inconsequential.)

But overall, I enjoyed The Little Matchstick Girl a lot, and I got what I was expecting out of it — plus an extra hour of playtime.

[pbparjeter]

Cut the Sky by SV Linwood @svlin

This is probably the last game I’ll review during Spring Thing. I did play or look at a few others. Congratulations to everyone who entered!

The Story

In Cut the Sky, you’re a nondescript person with a blade that can cut almost anything within reach. Your goal, as the title suggests, is to cut the sky.

In each chapter, you encounter characters who are defined mostly by their archetypal roles: a gunman, a wizard, a thief, and the like. These are simple roles, but they’re always well-sketched.

About the gunman...

Is the gun-spinning gunman who tells you you’re pretty good “really something” a Revolver Ocelet reference? I don’t know, but I guess it says something about how archetypal these characters are.

But describing how Cut the Sky relies on archetypes undersells its originality. It’s somewhere between a grand-scale myth and a fully fleshed-out sci-fi/fantasy story with real worldbuilding. It’s just the right amount of detail for a game of this length.

The Puzzles

Playing Cut the Sky is just as unique. It’s made almost entirely of “think outside the box” puzzles, which are, again, centered around your cut-anything blade.

From the start, you’re given a way to solve a confrontation directly or indirectly, i.e., using brute force or not. Violence is the answer to this one, but only if you really want it to be.

From there, the story puts you into gradually more complex situations. There are about a dozen or so chapters, most of which are pretty thoroughly-drawn setups. The marketplace chapter is a particularly fleshed-out scenario. Then, once you reach the tower at the end, things get a little simpler again and the game enters its denouement.

Overall, the puzzle solutions are pretty straightforward, but the game does challenge you by reframing things. Each puzzle solution is similar, but not exactly the same.

In other words, “thinking outside the box” means something different each time. By the time the game threw the color spectrum riddle at me, it got the better of me — I was overconfident in my expectations of what I was supposed to do.

Technically Spotless

This game is almost technically spotless. Parser rejection messages are broad and make sense in context. For example, you never hear “that’s fixed in place,” but rather something along the lines of “that’s absent or not important.”

More importantly, there are basically no overlapping keywords. The game never asked “which one do you mean?” unless I was actually interacting with similar objects.

On top of that, many of the commands are diegetic — ie. framed as in-game actions. To be fair, you’re not going to do much apart from cutting and talking (and optionally kissing) in Cut the Sky. But even saving and restoring are framed as remembering things. Plus, you “wander” instead of using compass directions, and you need to “think” instead of typing hints. I liked this a lot.

I have only one complaint: a few of the puzzles had overly specific requirements, especially the thief and wizard puzzles.

In the case of the thief, it’s unclear how her pattern of movement reacts to your actions. Similarly, the wizard would have been a little more straightforward if his spells were ordered instead of cycled. But these are minor complaints.

Themes

I’ve saved this section for last because I’m not too confident in my ability to analyze the game’s themes. What is Cut the Sky about?

Other reviews have described it as atmospheric and cathartic, which seems spot on to me. The game’s meaning has to be approached indirectly.

Cutting the sky at the end of the game is a powerful act, but it’s not really backed by anything. It’s not really righteous or rebellious, nor is it justified or unjustified. It’s just what you do. What else would you do with a sword that could cut anything?

Yet the final action does have weight, mostly due to the span of time and scale of civilizations portrayed in the game.

So you can project any motives you want onto your quest. Maybe I’m wrong here and the author had more specific intentions — in which case it’s my fault for glossing over in-game information that I thought was peripheral.

The bottom line is: this is a really one-of-a-kind game. I rarely vote, but I’ve nominated this for best in show, and I hope it wins. Admittedly, I was swayed by the existing reviews and IFDB scores, but Cut the Sky certainly deserves the attention it’s getting. Best of luck to the author!

[LoganDelaney]

Thank you for the kind words, P.B.! I will definitely be checking out some of the other media you’ve mentioned

[pbparjeter]

Thanks Logan, and congratulations to everyone. Especially the tied winners!

I also played part of @vi (Vivian Rose’s) anpa ma. I didn’t get very far, but I did pick up a bit of the language. Hopefully it gets more engagement in the future.

[pbparjeter]

I was recently playing the original Prince of Persia and guess who did some of the artwork … Avril Harrison, possible inspiration for Elaine Marley’s early designs.

I found this gallery of her Amiga artwork and this bio. She passed away in 2019.

The Amiga is several years before my time so I only know about how important it was to early computer art second hand. Here’s a related video that I really liked about someone trying to recreate an old piece of Amiga art:

Four-Byte Burger