Help! I Can’t Find My Glasses! No, seriously, I lost my glasses. I went to a game con this weekend, first time I’ve risked a con since COVID. I live near one of the ends of the line for BART (Bay Area lightrail system) and the San Francisco airport is at the very far end of its line, so after a very long trip I got there and waited at the curb for the hotel shuttle. And waited and waited. I saw some other hotels’ shuttles three times. Finally I saw a long black van with my hotel’s name. And I followed it as it went from one end of the hotel shuttle area of the curb to the other. Three other vans were picking up at the moment, and there wasn’t a convenient space. I was getting a little worried and was waving to get the driver’s attention… but rather than color outside the lines of the shuttle pickup zone into the capacious, nearly empty rideshare app pickup zone, the shuttle… just kept going. And it was late and dark and the wind was picking up and it was getting cold. At night, the ice weasels came.
No, wait, the ice weasels aren’t in this story. And don’t feel too sorry for me: I’m a longtime Bay Area-ite so of course I had enough layers of clothing on hand to handle a 35-degree temperature range (18 for those of you in countries that thought their citizens could handle something so dangerously French as the metric system). But after an hour on BART and more than a half hour of standing waiting for the shuttle and watching it sail by, I was tired, and hungry, and cold, and just wanting to get to my room, and feeling sorry for myself. I called the hotel and they said I could use a rideshare and get reimbursed. So I did. And I watched the ETA go from 3 minutes… to 4… to 5… back to 4… stuck at 3 for several minutes and then finally it arrived. So that gives you an idea of what state I was in.
I’m not that myopic. I don’t wear glasses around the house. If I’m not navigating some huge space, I frequently just tuck 'em in a shirt pocket indoors. Also, I was very clever and prepared and responsible and had packed a spare pair of glasses just in case something happened.
You probably see where this is going: I was so clever about packing spare glasses that it enabled not noticing until I was packing to leave that one pair was missing. I just sent a “lost item” notice to the rideshare driver. So I found this game to be very relatable, even though, unlike the player character here, I’m pretty sure my glasses hadn’t been stolen.
According to IFDB, this may be Lacey Green’s first game. We’re told at the start that we’ll meet “three potential love interests”, so we’re looking for glasses and love. I played through three times, and only two characters seemed to be potential love interests, and at one point I encountered some [placeholder] text, so I peeked at the source – it looks like the author has some bigger plans for this game than made it into this version. I hope we get to see the whole thing later.
The third time through, though, I did find my glasses. May life imitate art.