Trail Stash by Andrew Schultz
Other reviews have pointed out the rather inescapable fact that Andrew Schultz is the king of IF worldplay games (as well as of IF chess games). But what may be even more typically Schultz is his good-natured, positive approach to humans who are not being as they could or should be. He’s always working with people who are too angry, to conceited, too incurious, too aggressive, too insecure, too anything, and then somehow they are either forced to leave the protagonist alone, or, and I think this is more frequent, they are reformed – at least a little. Schultz has a sharp eye for very everyday human failings, and he’d like us all to, you know, just be a bit nicer to each other and work together a bit more! It’s interesting to me that even in a game as abstract and surreal as Trail Stash, this remains a recognisable concern.
Trail Stash is in some ways a simple game: there’s a highly symmetrical map, you pick up items, you use items in locations, and once you’ve used every item (one per location), you’re done. In other ways it’s a complicated game. It is built entirely around spoonerisms. This is tricky for the author! Not only are spoonerisms not that easy to come up with, but the puzzle design requires us to have a location A and an item B such that A will be turned into spoon-A by the use of B that is also spoon-B. Like, for the perfect puzzle, four semantically unrelated phrases have to come together into one image that makes sense. Trail Stash doesn’t always succeed at that – I felt that especially for the items, either their normal or their spooned version sometimes didn’t really make an appearance – but it succeeds several times, and that’s already impressive.
To be honest, I’m a very non-ideal judge for this game. Here’s Mike Russo:
I didn’t get either of those, and still don’t. I had to look up ‘pail’ (it’s a kind of bucket) and ‘funk’ is, as far as I know, a kind of music and an attitude. The phrase ‘funk pail’ doesn’t really make sense to me. And it’s spoonerism, ‘punk fail’… I mean, maybe that’s a very bad Greenday concert? When you use this item, the effect is described thus: “The funk pail reveals the poseurs who participate a lot in class but do not contribute anything!” And I have literally no idea what is going on.
With ‘plaid base’, I don’t even get the spoonerism. ‘Baid plase’. Listening only to the sounds, I get ‘bade place’, maybe? I bade him make place? No, I just don’t get it.
So… yeah, I’m sure others have enjoyed this more than I have. The game made sense to me about half the time, in the sense that I solved about half the puzzles myself and brute-forced my way through the rest. It was fine! But you probably need to be a native speaker of English to enjoy this the way it’s supposed to be enjoyed.