To Sea in a Sieve

Number of Reviews: 7
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Good, but could have been more surprising, October 7, 2023

*To Sea in a Sieve* is a prequel to *To Hell in a Hamper*, J. J. Guest's 2003 game where you find yourself in a hot air balloon with a crazy person who has brought way too many heavy items. That game was a sequence of puzzles about getting rid of all these objects; because if you don't, you're both going to die. The setup of *To Sea in a Sieve* is... more or less identical, except that this time you're in a boat, and your companion is a pirate captain who wants to bring all his treasures. I wonder if the character of the pirate captain was inspired by the captain from Ryan Veeder's game *Captain Verdeterre's Plunder*, or whether Veeder and Guest are just both leaning into standard pirate tropes.

I looked up my review of *To Hell in a Hamper* and found this final paragraph:

My single complaint is that the game doesn't actually contain that many *jokes*. It has a good comic setup, and some of the stuff you discover inside Booby's coat is hilarious; but there are few events or descriptions in the rest of the game that make one laugh or smile. This game would have benefited from having Admiral Jota as a co-author; his gift for stuffing a game full of funny remarks would have been very effective here.

It's fairly unlikely that J. J. Guest wrote *To Sea in a Sieve* in reaction this, but there is a sense in which he *could* have: the main difference between his 2003 game and his 2023 game is that the new one is funnier. The captain is a ridiculous guy, and the interactions between him and his cabin boy are a source of smiles. The lesser of two weevils indeed. It also helps that the implementation of the game is deep, and useless or failed actions often lead to amusing responses.

The puzzles are fairly standard, I would say, tending towards traditional object and NPC manipulation sequences that could have fitted in almost any prototypical adventure game, text or graphical. The ones I enjoyed most where those with relatively ridiculous effects, such as blowing up the barrel, simply because those effects were more particularly suited to this specific game. As a puzzle, the little physics conundrum at the very end was my favourite.

This game is very clear about what it sets out to do and it does that very well. That's good, but I was a bit surprised that everything played out *this* straightforwardly. I was hoping for some kind of plot twist, or perspective change, or something that would make the game more surprising, more memorable, and more different from its predecessor. But no, you get *exactly* what you are told to expect on the tin. Not very fair to complain about that, I suppose, but having recently played J. J. Guest's intriguing *Excalibur*, I guess I was hoping for a little bit more.

But when *To the Moon in a Minibus* arrives, hopefully before 2043, I'll play it and no doubt with a smile on my face.