Spring Thing 2022 Review Spreadsheet

Competitions Spring Thing
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I’ve created a review spreadsheet for Spring Thing 2022, which is just a copy of the 2021 IFComp review spreadsheet.

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For clarity of parity, I’m going to mark my reviews on the spreadsheet, even though I won’t be posting them until after the festival. It might be a good idea for others intending to release some post-festival reviews to do the same.

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3

Nice idea.

I’ve made my own personal reviews already so I’ll put it down on the spreadsheet and (most likely) release them after the festival.

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If you’re an author or not posting reviews publicly right now, could you add “(author)” after your name in the spreadsheet? I’ve already done so for the existing ones. This is from the IFComp spreadsheet, to separate publicly available reviews from currently private ones.

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My bad. Mentally noted for the future.

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Thanks for setting this up! Seeing it up, and seeing reviewers populate it relatively quickly, helped me get started, just as the IFComp '21 spreadsheet helped me get started. So I hope/suspect it will help others, too.

I marked the games I saw beforehand with orange backgrounds. If it’s better off clean, I can remove this, but I find this sort of thing helped me minimally during IFComp to decide what to do next. (I still may write reviews. But as I did with IFComp I want to tackle the games I haven’t seen.)

It’s going to be neat to see reviews from the authors revealed publicly in Mid-May.

I want to set a minimum goal of reviewing one-half of the games I was not involved in, but I also want to try to review everything.

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According to the Spreadsheet, the following games have no reviews as of yet (currently available OR post-festival):

NOTE: :white_check_mark:'s signify the completion of a review since the original time of posting.

MAIN FESTIVAL:

BACK GARDEN:

I’m going to focus on these, because ideally, in my naïve universe, everyone would get reviewed at least once. Happy reviewing, folks!

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FWIW I just played Hole Man and Digit is next on my to-play list; I have a bit of a review backlog but I should be getting those out in the next few days in case that’s helpful for other folks looking to prioritize.

@cchennnn found a bug in externoon, then fixed it like a boss, so if anyone’s planning on playing that one here’s a link to the post with the corrected file.

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Thanks for bringing attention to these @pinkunz !

It doesn’t help when two of the most prolific reviewers (@DeusIrae & @mathbrush) are also your beta testers. (Thanks for the testing. You guys really are amazing! :slight_smile: )

The Box is a bit of an experiment. It’s the pilot game for a new IF language I’m creating, so I’d love some feedback on the game, and the overall system and environment. Thanks all!

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I’ll chime in and say that The Box was the first game I played, and it was really fun. If you like room escape puzzles, you’ll love it.

And Kreate, which Paul created to write the game in, is fantastic.

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Thanks so much for highlighting these! It’s great to see the community uplifting one another.

I’ll also chime in that I picked very briefly through The Hole Man, and it’s definitely worth a look if you like newweird fiction.

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I normalized the spreadsheet to alphabetize review author names as we did for IFComp 21. The procedure is as follows:

  1. entrants are on the right, because their/our reviews will be revealed later
  2. alphabetization is by last name, if it exists as part of the user name, then user name. So for instance if I were Andrew, I would be moved to the front of the author list, but because I’m Andrew Schultz, I’m currently all the way on the right.

I hope this makes things a bit quicker if we are hunting for a particular review author! Now that we have a lot more reviewers, this concern exists. It’s a good one to have, of course.

ETA: anyone who adds a name in the future, if you want to add your name in order, right-click on a column next to where you want to place it and click “add column 1 left” or “add column 1 right” as necessary. The row sums on the spreadsheet are of the form F30:30, so this tackles the whole row, and you shouldn’t have to adjust anything else. (And if you just put a name at the end, that’s okay, too, as things can be sorted easily by highlighting a column and dragging it.)

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Just wanted to say that I’ve started playing Manifest No (mostly out of 0 review solidarity) and I think it deserves a shout out. Some truly excellent writing in there, even if reading it takes a bit of work (it started clicking for me when I got to some dialogue in Chapter 2).

I do see why there are no reviews though. I’ve been reading for over an hour and I’ve done 3 chapters. 3 of 27… Not going to stop here though!

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I’d like to shout out Sweetpea as well. The prose strikes a wonderful balance between “otherworldly horror” and “seen through the eyes of a normal child who likes soft objects, candy, and feeling safe.” It is a story very much in the gothic tradition of taking an everyday horror and evoking its feeling through a larger-than-life incident.

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Thank you so much!! I did a little happy dance at seeing this to be honest, I’m so thrilled that I managed to balance between the two- writing younger characters, especially in horrific situations can be a tricky thing that I worry I sometimes mangle, haha. I was also a smidge worried about labelling it as an out and out gothic piece- (despite the genre being one of my favourite to have studied/written in/read) because it felt a bit too ‘modern’ set for that while drafting it, so I’m stoked that it still holds true to the tradition. This made my day!

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I just played Thin Walls and really enjoyed it – it’s a nice bit of surreal horror that I think is likely to resonate with anyone who’s rented a room in a shared house before. It’s not the only game I’ve played that I’ve liked, but it doesn’t seem to have gotten much attention, so I thought I’d mention it. (Also, if the default Twine CSS on the title page puts you off, I can confirm the rest of the game doesn’t use it.)

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Thank you so much!

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EJ and I played Ma Tiger’s Terrible Trip yesterday and I saw it has hardly any reviews so I’d like to plug it a little. It was memorable, action packed, and left me wanting more when it ended! The conversation sections in particular were really fun to play in a way that would be hard to do in single-player IF.

I know there was talk of setting up a matchmaking thread, but it doesn’t look like that went anywhere - should we go ahead and start one?

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Great idea! I can modify the personal one I started yesterday so as not to clutter things up!

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