Midsummer's Eve

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A chance to win a fun scavenger hunt if your 13 year old self never did, June 19, 2023

I remember the author's Sentient Beings as one of the highlights of the first TALP jam. It's quite good, and if you're having withdrawal after finsihing this year's entries, you might want to go back and look at it. It's a scavenger hunt, like Midsummer's Eve, but there are fewer things to collect and more abstract puzzles. With SB, there's no doubt you'll get things done. You have 24 total specimens to find and can only carry 6 jars, so you can go back and forth a bit. There are a few verbs to guess, but they're hinted directly elsewhere. It's fun and cute and well done.

Midsummer's Eve is a lot less solitary, and you are a kid who vows to win your town's treasure hunt this year in a town full of magic. The treasure hunt features 12 clues, nicely laid out so that kids hunting for clues can find them and put them back or, in the case of one gift item, everyone gets one, because it's the sort of item kids like. The clues aren't strictly ordered, but you need tone to get another, sometimes. Clues 1-7 build to finding clues 8-12, each of which gives a piece of a passcode you tell to win. There are even other kids walking around, but you're way faster than they are. Still, you can ask them for clues! In fact they're cute in a clueless sort of way saying "I think you have to (X)." One was still struggling on solving zero clues when I had ten. I kind of felt mean pumping them repeatedly for clues, or maybe I was chuckling a bit inside at them, once again in touch with my inner ten-year-old. (For silly features, I think it would be cute to have a no-badgering difficulty level where you can't ask for too many hints at once!)

ME uses the Adventuron parser in interesting ways. You have to order specific food in some cases e.g. ORDER HAMBURGER WITH MUSTARD. The garnishes matter to find a few clues. There's not a lot you have to intuit, which is not surprising, because really abstract puzzles would be mean to thirteen year olds who just wanted a fun treasure hunt. And while some of this is, for the reductionist, just following instructions, it's all tied up in things like climbing mushrooms or interacting with a mythical beast. But there are also commoner pleasures such as riding a Ferris wheel or playing carnival games. These don't interest me-the-adult, but I really enjoyed being able to play along as a kid who thought they were wonderful or mysterious or whatever. Also, in a thoughtful fun twist, the specific food you order? Well, you can only carry one at a time, but you can just eat it and order something else. Everything is free. Yay! You literally have an excuse to eat until you're sick, or until you can't avoid being sick tomorrow. That's what festivals are for.

The graphics are all very good and add to the mystic feel. I read on the Adventuron server they were AI generated but given my attempts to create cover art with AI, it's a lot trickier than saying "Okay, draw a big picture with this that and the other." In fact I had a weird bit of discovery where one location appeared to be plain, but lo and behold, on revisiting it, the graphic actually loaded this time. It added to the whole magic feel. I usually knew to wait for Adventuron graphics to load, but my eagerness to explore and beat the other kids out betrayed me for a bit.

There's also a mystery intertwined into all this. I wound up restarting in order to actually get a transcript, and I solved the side quest (or a chunk of it) before finding the final clue I hadn't. But I had fun rolling through things and forgot to check off on the secret items. This speaks to replayability. And the layout is very nice beyond the graphics. You can either click on CLUES (to see the clues–as an adult, 12 clues is a lot to juggle) or MAP or just type those commands. You forget this sort of thing once you get used to it. I was also surprised you could mouse-click on the help menu. This isn't cutting-edge GUI for AAA game studios, but it's so welcome for independent games.

I really enjoyed my experience with ME and I suspect you will too. There are a lot of things that just felt right, such as a grouchy man distracting me from taking an item I needed, and I missed the obvious way to get around that for a bit. It has a good economy and balance for its rooms, too. By that, I mean that there's usually only one thing to do per room, so even if that last clue evades you, you can focus on rooms where you've done nothing yet and potentially even cross off ones where you have, and with the rooms mostly in a figure-eight, you never have to backtrack too far. The descriptions are robust enough that this process of elimination works and you shouldn't get bogged down, wherever you might get stuck. Also, the clues are ranked by ease of discovery, which is a nice gesture for both 13 year old kids and whoever is playing this game.

So it's a well-balanced game, and you need/get to do a lot of neat things to find all twelve clues. Oh, and you can't cheat and tell the answer right away, even if you know four of the pass-phrase's words and can guess the fifth.

A pleasant summer carnival game, June 25, 2023

I briefly beta-tested this game.

This is a feel-good game (mostly!) about a fun children's competition in a quaint village on a summer's evening.

A carnival is in town and the Mayor is throwing a competition where you have to gather clues. You race around with a bunch of other kids who move from place to place, all of you looking for clues.

The kids running around really helps make the game feel more alive. And the puzzles in the game have a wide variety, a lot of them making use of your ability to customize requests for various items like food and flowers.

There's a vaguely sinister subplot running through as well. Even with this, though, it feels like there's not a strong narrative thread, more just an excuse to have fun, which isn't necessarily bad. Fun for a nice diversion.

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