Not so Happy Easter 2025
I’m not, personally, thrilled about returning to old-school parser experiences. I miss conveniences like being able to use ‘it’, and I don’t really like the ultra terse prose of games that had to fit in very limited memory. But I can roll with it when necessary. What’s more, I already had a ZX Spectrum emulator (Fuse) installed on my Ubuntu computer… so why not try Not so Happy Easter 2025?
And while this game is in many ways a very old school parser experience, it turns out to have been strongly influenced by more modern trends as well. The puzzles are fair. The game cannot be put in an unwinnable state! I struggled with the parser to some extent, and I definitely typed ‘L’ a few times when I did not want to load a save, but the experience of playing the game was mostly quite painless.
(The loading thing was very confusing, though. It seemed to load states that I had never saved, from way farther in the game than I had at that point reached. And it also did not load the same save every time, but neither did it give me a choice of which game to load. Nor could I determine where the save files were kept on my disk. Mysteries wrapped in enigmas.)
The premise of the game is this: you created an Easter egg hunt in the park for some local kids. But they disappeared! And now you have to find out where they are. Turns out that they have been kidnapped by an evil serial killer and you have to solve devious puzzles in order to save their lives. Very cliché, but it works. At first I thought the game was also going to lean into heavy cynicism – that’s the vibe of the first few paragraphs of text, and the first interaction I had with another person had the protagonist think some fairly fatphobic thoughts. But this vibe gradually disappears. By the time I was in the forest, I was quite enjoying the game’s funny touches, like the Kinder egg and the rubber ducky, and the mini conversation about stereotypical associations with the homeless man.
The puzzles were quite good too. I used hints a few times, mostly because of problems with either the parser or feedback. (You need to unscrew the light with a knife. That’s fine, but I think I should have gotten some useful feedback when I tried to do the exact same action with my credit card. And I was stumped when I had put the notice on the car, only to learn from the walkthrough that one should use ‘use on’ rather than ‘put on’.) But with a little perseverance, I think this game is solvable without hints.
And the ending was quite funny! An unexpected touch.