Esther’s (Brad and Alleson Buchanan)
Played on: 30th October (3rd October version played)
How I played it: Downloaded and ran on Opera
How long I spent: 10 minutes to play twice
Esther’s is a short Twine game built with Snowman and Tweego, aimed at children. This is a simple story about two mice trying to communicate a brunch order to the human owner of a restaurant, who doesn’t speak Mouse. The player makes choices for the mice to try pointing at different things or playing charades. The game only takes five minutes to play, maybe ten if you’re reading out loud to a kid.
This is going to be a short review for a very short game. In one of the other reviews I did this year, I mentioned that two of my favourite recent IFComp entries were Out and My Gender is a Fish. These are both tiny games by IFComp standards, and that’s a good thing – they both do exactly what they want to do, they do it well, and then they end before they overegg it. I think a small project gives authors the chance to really pay attention to detail and get everything polished, tested and proof-read. It’s easier to perfect 1000 words than 10,000.
Esther’s has earned a place on this list. It’s one of the shortest entries I’ve played this year (it’s either this or 4 Edith + 2 Niki), but it’s the most finely-crafted entry I’ve played so far this year. It’s obvious that the authors have put a lot of care and energy into this game. I really like Esther’s, to be clear. The presentation is beautiful (even without the pictures, the colour palette and big font look very good to me) and the writing is tons of fun.
There’s essentially one puzzle to the whole game, that of getting your brunch order correct. It’s not a hard puzzle – it’s easily brute-forced by lawnmowering all the choices you’re given. That’s fine, it’s a kid’s game. I’m not expecting twisty passages and cryptograms. And actually, having played one quick run and one thorough run, I think it’s a lot more fun when you work your way down all the choices and find all the little jokes and character beats.
I guess the big question mark for me is if Esther’s is successful as a work of children’s literature. I don’t have kids and I’ve never tried writing for children so I can’t judge Esther’s very well on that front. I’ve peeked at a few other reviews and I saw Victor Gijsber’s report that his four-year-old loved the game but had trouble keeping track of what objects were in play. And yeah, I can see that being hard to remember for a child, and clearly it is hard. I think you are always funnelled towards the puzzle solution, just by dint of exhausting all the other choices, so I don’t expect it will be a problem for gameplay, but maybe it’s a problem for storytelling.
For my part, like Victor, I was wondering about the choice of mimosas and avocado toast as the main objective. These don’t seem like foodstuffs or words that a young child is likely to come across often. (Although I do like the joke that not even the mice are sure what a mimosa is; they just think it’s some kind of orange juice.) I’m not certain what age group this is aimed at – the setting is very nursery-friendly, but word choices like “satisfaction” and “meticulous” seem demanding for that age group. Not impossible with an adult reading aloud, though, I don’t think.
Quibbles about the target audience aside, I don’t have a problem with Esther’s. It’s charming and it’s cute as buttons. I hope it does well.