Under They Thunder by Andrew Schultz
I think of Andrew Schultz as a bit of a cult author. He makes a very specific type of game, and makes that type of game very well; but it’s a kind of game that many players will find easier to respect than really get into. However, one just has to look at the scores of last year’s Very File Fairy File to see three people who gave it a 10 – and those people are the ‘cult’. I mean that it the most positive way possible. Those are the people who really dig the type of game that Schultz makes. And he is not going to disappoint them this year.
So what is the type of game I’m talking about? Well, the typical Andrew Schultz game is a wordplay game built around one very specific type of wordplay – palindromes, for instance, or, in this case, pig Latin. [See Footnote.] In a sense, the game then tries to be exhaustive: there is a systematic attempt to put an incredible number of instances of the wordplay into the game, and to build all aspects of the game (world, puzzles, story) around those instances. Furthermore, Andrew Schultz games comes with often quite incredible quality-of-life features, including sophisticated ways of getting hints. And finally, they always confront, in one way or another, the subject of bullying: these games are full of people who use verbal or emotional tactics to shut others down or manipulate them, and your job as player is finding ways to deal with people like that.
Under They Thunder is no exception. It is full to the brim of instances of pig Latin, often being quite encyclopedic about it, such as when it offers ten different variations on the formula “X-ile X-ay Isle”. The setting and story make little sense except as containers of precisely these instances of word-play: the reason that we have the locations we have is that they fit the pig Latin scheme. But there’s also the clear undercurrent of a confrontation with bullies and manipulators. And finally, we have great quality-of-life features, this time including several teleportation commands and an object that will close off all parts of the game that you don’t need to see on an ‘easy’ run.
I spent a solid hour with the game and managed to gather in more than 20 points. By that time I was kind of exhausted, and running out of ideas for what to do with the ray, and I decided to call it quits. Like the last two years, I admire what Andrew Schultz is doing here; and like the last two years, I feel that it’s not quite for me. It’s a bit too overwhelming, a bit too far from what fires me up about interactive fiction. But I certainly think that there will be some people who are going to enjoy the hell out of this!
[Footnote]
If you are as clueless about this as I was before I looked it up on Wikipedia: pig Latin is a form of wordplay in English where you transform, say, “boat” into “oat bay”, or “goat” into “oat gay”, or “stout” into “out stay”.