Spring Thing 2020 Reviews

There are some on Narrativum:

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We played JELLY at the SF Bay IF Meetup. (It was fully online this time; no actual “meeting up” occurred.) We quite enjoyed it!

Ending spoilers ahoy:

We were doing pretty well right up until the the last pattern. We’d purchased the long story from the droll-teller at the Hollow before we purchased the medium story. We then followed his suggested channel pattern, unfreezing the crystalline figure, but freezing the droll-teller, locking us out of the medium story, so we never saw the hint that we needed to bring the goblinfruit, ash, and tadpole.

It is in fact possible to swap the twins back by re-running the droll-teller’s channel pattern, but we didn’t think of that; we didn’t know/think that we would even want to do that.

I have a suggestion: either don’t allow players to buy the long tale until they buy the medium tale (just don’t show it as an option), or, if they do buy the long tale before the medium tale, don’t include a big red “You’re ready” message in the long tale; in that case, say “You’re not ready” and encourage the player to hear the other tale first.

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I’ll piggyback on this thread to mention that I’ve posted some thoughts on my favorite Spring Thing 2020 games at Datalexic. I focused on playing all the choice-based games with the “short” label in the festival, though there are many interesting games in all formats and lengths on display!

The games covered are:
So Are The Days by Dawn Sueoka
Another Love Story by Hélène Sellier
The Golden by Kerry Taylor

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Alex/Comfort Castle also reviews Spring Thing games (currently, there’s a review for Braincase):

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There is many short reviews in the IFDB too :

https://ifdb.tads.org/viewcomp?id=8i3v25uotxyx116

(No, it’s not an advertising… :smiley:)

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Ryan Veeder’s Judgment of “85 Verbs” (precursor to “77 Verbs”)

Textsplaining - Caution: crude language and severe reviewer bent

https://textsplaining.blogspot.com/2020/04/spring-thing-2020-land-of-breakfast.html
https://textsplaining.blogspot.com/2020/04/spring-thing-2020-prongleman-job-by.html
https://textsplaining.blogspot.com/2020/04/spring-thing-2020-77-verbs-by-mathbrush.html

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