Hi, all — it looks like “create a thread for reviews” is the thing to do, so I’m adding one for my reviews.
I’ll make each review a separate reply.
So far, I’ve played
If you’re interested in my general perspective: I’m a long-time player of parser IF and have generally leaned toward longer, puzzle-y games. I haven’t played much non-parser IF, so take my reviews on these with a larger grain of salt than usual.
This is the first game I played in ST26: the cover art drew me in, and I’m most interested in parser-based games.
There’s a lot of great things about the game:
it has a very strong sense of place, and very consistent narration. You get a very good sense of the character you’re playing as, and the authors were very good at handling default messages and fail-commands to reinforce that.
the worldbuilding is great: I really like the idea of a bard-insect, and the authors did a great job of making this an interesting place to explore
the puzzles were, as promised in the tags, forgiving and relatively easy. There are puzzles to solve, but I didn’t need to use any hints (though there are some!), and I’m no master of hard puzzles. Plus, it appears that trying something wrong didn’t have long-term downsides. There was one place where the game ended in failure, but it was from my action in the last turn, so it was easy to UNDO and continue.
The implementation was well-done: I hit ~2 small bugs (commands that returned no output at all), but these were very minor and didn’t negatively impact my enjoyment
The writing was excellent: charming and consistent in tone and style. I really enjoyed reading this.
I GOT TO MAKE FRIENDS WITH A MOTH
I really enjoyed playing this and have recommended it to several IF-newish friends. I want to go back and play the previous game in this series.
(and apologies to @baezil and @alyshkalia ; I didn’t think to start a transcript; otherwise, I’d share it)
This is a small, short game with a slightly-creepy premise: “Why is this building so empty and where did (almost) everyone go?”
It’s parser-based and puzzle-y: there are a few small puzzles (in the EXAMINE, MOVE, etc) kind of way, and one main puzzle, which is a multi-step puzzle about changing the state of an item. I like multi-step puzzles, but I wish this one had some in-game clues that might have pushed me toward it: If there had been a way to know the tea was cold, that the guards might have been thirsty, etc.
It’s pretty light in its implementation: except for things that are important to the puzzles, almost everything else is unimplemented. That does make it easy to figure out what is required to solve puzzles 
, but it does rob the game of the sense of realism: you enter an office with a desk, and the game doesn’t know what a “desk” is.
It’s a game with an interesting take on directions—it eschews the normal NSEW navigation and instead, you ENTER and EXIT nearby locations. This worked well, except at one place, it describes “two hallways, one left and one right” and I spent too much time trying to travel down them, ultimately concluding that these were unexplorable scenery-only things. Except the game didn’t provide any sort of “you don’t need to go down them” messages to make that clear.
You’ll probably need a walkthrough handy to solve it.
I do like the setting (plus, I learned some Finnish words!), and now I really want the San Francisco City Hall to have a sauna in it!
@Solarius : if you’d like some help in polishing this, let me know if I can help. I’m happy to playtest any future versions, and I just wrote a large-ish game in Inform6/PunyInform, so I may be able to help out with an implementation issues.
Transcript:
tmcc.txt (28.5 KB)
(reviewing this game will inevitably involve Spoilers, though this isn’t really a game about surprise, so it may not matter)
This is an impactful but very micro-sized experience (you can reach the end-condition in only four turns).
This isn’t a “game”, at least not in the normal sense. It’s using traditional IF technology to tell a story, with a very limited parser. In many ways, this makes it interesting: while this could easily have been a web-based lightweight “click on object to examine it” kind of game, the fact that there is a parser, and all of these possible actions that such IF normally allows, you can’t do these things, makes this more impactful. The theme of “I wish I do something different, but I can’t” reinforces the theme of control and abuse.
I don’t know if I missed anything; for me, this was a game of examination. The room didn’t seem to change, you can’t do anything but LOOK, EXAMINE, or WAIT, and the last is implemented, but doesn’t seem to change the “game state”.
I found it interesting in the experiemental-use-of-IF kind of way. I would encourage people trying it out to use the CW command for content-warnings: some might find the themes here very triggering.
I’m choosing not to publish a transcript: this both feels too personal to share, and the game is very short and I don’t think it would be helpful.
I’m glad you had a good experience with our game. If you do remember what commands were bugged (or what you were trying to do at the time), let us know (we’re making a to do list). No worries about the transcript, we were both too busy this week to dig too deep on any mid-Festival fixes anyway. Thanks for this exceedingly kind review!
I also wanted to chime in and say I also noticed and appreciated The Missing City Council’s take on directions. I found it a little confusing in practice, at least at first, but I admired the spirit, and I think it’s something worth returning to/reworking in future games. Parser navigation is such a sticky little dilemma, and I’m always happy to see authors play in that space and try some new things.
@baezil : Alas, I don’t remember exactly what caused the empty replies. I think one might have been talking with someone?
I think I’ll be playing your game again soon; I have a friend who only really plays IF with me and I was going to introduce her to it. I’ll keep a transcript this time.
I don’t object to NSEW directions in games (and in games with a larger map, might be the only reasonable way). But I agree: it was interesting in TMCC partially because I felt like I was always “facing forward” in a kind of explorer way.
This is definitely a place where opinions vary; in my ST26 game, Our Lady of Thorns, I use NSEW directions but also map some of those directions to in/out in places where there’s an obvious “in”: for example, going from the outdoor garden to the indoor hut can be either NORTH or IN. I like that in/out-i-ness, but one tester disliked having different directions for the same movement.
Thank you @joelburton for your review, and insights (also baezil, but new users can mention only two users in a post)! IF is a new form of expression to me, so thank you for helping me improve. And that is greatly needed, as I apparently grew blind to the game while working on it: I thought it contained enough for a short game 
But my lack of IF experience in general also contributes to that.
So, according to this thread (and insight from others), I should really polish this further, maybe for next year’s New Game Plus? 
In that case help is appreciated @joelburton , as polishing this game could teach me more about proper IF writing.
@mathbrush , as the game is free software with a public Git repository, would it be okay if I opened up a branch called “plus”, where I could work the game with others publicly?
The rules for publication only apply to before Spring Thing starts, so you’re free to do anything you want with your game now (as long as it remains available to Spring Thing players!)