Wolfbiter encounters Spring Thing 2025

[wolfbiter]

Three-Card Reading by Norbez Jones
Playtime: 10 minutes

This made me want to talk about:

• I have played Yancy At The End Of The World! I think it would be pretty hard to connect with this game if you haven’t, as there’s not much set-up on the characters or their situations. Actually, since I didn’t play the specific ending referenced here, I was also definitely getting info that didn’t mean much to me.

• The portraits for the characters were cute and engaging, and the voice acting gave me a better sense of personality without introducing too much friction. I generally liked the layout with text in the middle and it was always clear who was speaking.

• As a quality-of-life feature, I like that you can always scroll back up to see earlier text, since sometimes I’ll want to check that I understood something based on what happened next

My one fervent wish:

So, I had a bit of a rollercoaster experience with this one.

My preference is generally for characters to feel realistic, including different characters having different perspectives and priorities. For about the first 90% of the game, I struggled with Mack, who narrates this game, because he is incredibly focused on Yancy, to the extent that it read to me as “it’s a law of the universe that Yancy is the main character.” For example, Mack’s first thought, which opens the game:

“The more I think about things with Yancy, the weirder they seem. It was the timing of things, first. The fact that there are days I met up with Yancy in the past that are the same as days others have met them, like our friend Caleb or Yancy’s neighbor Hendrix. Yancy’s tarot deck was the biggest clue for me – they said they got it exactly a week before Thanksgiving, in the morning, but how can that be if they and I met up that exact same morning?”

Mack continues to filter the whole game through a Yancy-centric lens:

Mack when he sees his first tarot card: “me before I met [Yancy]”
Mack when he sees his second tarot card: “me after meeting [Yancy]”
Mack when he sees his third tarot card: decides to finally ask Yancy what’s going on with them

But! The game absolutely bodied me at the last line, which brings me to:

Notable line

“If Yancy exists to create and help people, then why do I exist?”

Like YES, this is the tension I was feeling all game—what’s Mack’s deal? What does he care about beyond Yancy? So in a way I loved the turn to addressing that, and I think the game would have clicked well for me as say, the prologue to a Mack-centric game where we see how Mack wrestles with this realization and what conclusions he reaches.

But, of course, roller coaster, because none of that happens, the game just ends.

Overall, high production values boost this short follow-up to a previous work, but you may be left cold if you haven’t played the first one, or if you’re looking for more info about the other characters

Gameplay tips / typos

One of the “smart quote” style quotation marks is angled the wrong way on “spooky season”—my nemesis.