IFComp 2025 review: Not so Happy Easter by Petr Kain

Not so Happy Easter 2025 (NSHE) is a humourous, light horror adventure originally written by Petr Kain in the Czech language. The author's translation of it to English debuts in IFComp 2025. The platform is the ZX81, one of the most popular 8-bit microcomputers in Europe and the UK in the early 1980s, so you need to use an emulator to play it. I used and can recommend Retro Virtual Machine (RVM) which I've used for ZX81 text adventures before.

I found NSHE to be compelling, well designed and a lot of fun, so I would say to players, yes, it is worth the effort to get the emulator and play it if you're prepared to take that little bit of time to get into (or re-tap) its 8-bit mindset. It has some contemporary design sensibilities like an absence of random deaths and "walking dead" situations, and I also particularly enjoy retro-platformed IF that is set in the present day (unsurprising, as I made one of my own). NSHE offers the anachronistic delights of cell phones, Teslas and QR codes rendered via technology which predates their existence. As an Australian, the game was also culturally interesting for me. It has some local slang, the Czech currency and other European touches which might be inconsequential if you live there but are nice transporting details if you don't.

Note: I don't think the game's playtime estimate of half an hour is accurate. Bringing my retro-adventuring skills to bear, it took me 83 minutes to complete without hints. I don't know if it would be physically possible to get through it in half an hour at the accurately emulated game's sub-5Mhz speed. Commands have processing time, text doesn't appear instantaneously and you can't type too fast or characters are missed by the buffer. It's possible that on a different emulator, you may be able to overcrank a little, but RVM offered me real speed or an impossible-to-manage warp speed. On the plus side, I discovered you only have to type the first two characters of any word to be understood. The great danger for modern players is that L is not short for LOOK here but for LOAD, which will fastload a fastsaved game! To LOOK, either type LOOK or R (Refresh?)

Having recently commended the blurb for valley of glass, at least for its ability to draw me, I think NSHE has a good one too, and which is an accurate tonal harbinger of the game's content:

"You invented a simple adventure game for the kids in the town, where they had to solve simple puzzles and look for chocolate eggs. They solved nothing, they found nothing, and three of them got lost somewhere."

I especially like that second line conveying the mildly exasperated cynicism of the PC voice. The good thing is that that voice doesn't become overly cynical during play. 8-bit games of the day could be snarky at the expense of the game's narrative or atmosphere, and still can be if they emulate that tone, but I found NSHE to be sitting in a good spot. My own feeling of achievement in solving its 75 points worth of puzzles was not undermined by cheap one-liners. Those puzzles involve the PC's search for the missing kids with the goal of avoiding being drubbed by angry parents. There are a handful of F-bombs dropped and some described violence, but contextually there's not much of it and no gratuitousness.

The game starts in a town, and with this section being more open than what comes later, it's potentially a little more difficult, or at least less aimed. I found the key to success is to continue to make your rounds. The environment is mildly dynamic (e.g. there's a bus stop, and a bus that doesn't come immediately, and NPCs who come or go in response to events) – it can't be too dynamic because this is the ZX81 – but this is a game where repeat visits to locations and retrying actions over time can pay off. Once you've observed this, the fact that the roster of locations isn't too big works for you, as does the limited verb set. The game gives a complete list of verbs if you ask for VOCAB. Anything that can't be expressed with a more specific verb can be effected with USE A, or USE A ON B. There's lots of technical help, too, in the form of colour-coded feedback and the marking of interactive props with inverse text. Such features help prevent the wasting commands on things that aren't implemented.

The post-town adventure which takes place in spookier wilderness is where the game gets denser. This is well-performed classic adventure gaming with lots to do in a small number of locations, some back-and-forthing and the potential for new ideas and uses for such diverse items as an electric bike or a rubber duck to pop into the player's head. I finished with a score of 71/75, interpreting a few actions I performed as gaining bonus points, so there must have been some more that I missed. You can check your SCORE at any time en route.

Overall, Not so Happy Easter 2025 is a solid and solidly 8-bit adventure touching with humour on the tropes of modern life, still managing to exercise a bit of a PC voice and attitude through terse-leaning writing, and which does what it can technically to smooth play. I'm sure there will be games in the comp that aren't as well designed, and which don't play as smoothly, as this one which was written for hardware from four decades ago.

IFComp 2025 review: valley of glass by Devan Wardrop-Saxton

valley of glass, a lyrical-leaning and extremely short parser game by Devan Wardrop-Saxton, was the first IF I chose to play from the IFComp 2025 crop because I liked the blurb. However, when I say it is extremely short, I mean that it seems incomplete, a stub of an experience. The author may view it as complete – I don't know – but I expect that most players will not experience it that way. My review describes potentially everything in the game.

The blurb for valley of glass starts like this:

Here you are again, walking the North Road in a rare moment alone before another day of your seven years promised to the village blacksmith.

This called to my mind the English folk song The Blacksmith, the first track on both of Steeleye Span's first two studio albums, which I like very much, and I expected to find a broadly similar vibe here.

I assumed the PC was a woman, both because of the song and because of the line in the blurb "promised to the village blacksmith" which I read as being about marriage. When first examining my inventory, I found I was wearing "A heavy woolen coat made for a man twice your size." Then I wasn't sure. Perhaps the seven years I promised were of hard blacksmithing toil? If I was a woman, the coat description sentence was ambiguously written, though admittedly the blurb pointed out it was a borrowed coat; but that's the blurb. That info should be in the game if confusion is to be avoided.

My speculations continued. The blurb continued, "seven years until you may reunite with your love, the Black Bull of Norroway." Now I was thinking woman again, because the Black Bull of Norroway sounded like the kind of entity a woman betrothed to a blacksmith might instead pine for. What cinched the deal for womanhood were my boots: "Plain leather-soled boots that first belonged to your eldest sister, then your second-eldest sister, and now you." To play devil's advocate and suggest the boots might have been passed from sister to brother felt like a stretch atop all the other bits of info.

I thus find myself walking on the road in the game's first location. It's clear the author is unaware of Inform typicalities. X ME replies "as good-looking as ever" and no exits are listed. Testing the directions, I discover that a geographical and/or memory-based blockage exists in three of the four main directions, and that they imply puzzles I expect to solve. e.g.

But until you’ve won your iron shoes from the blacksmith, you’ll never make it past the first few switchbacks.

The southern location was a village. Here, no compass directions worked, so I tried IN. That provoked the end of the game. I had to run the ending a number of times before I got the feeling that yes, it can be considered a legitimate ending, as vague as it is about all things other than that a workday is beginning.

I couldn't locate a blacksmith, forge, shoes, or anyone or anything else, except some jewelled fruits in my inventory, polishable with the cloth I had. My instinct, when stuck in certain kinds of parser game, learned back in the day from Infocom's Wishbringer, is to try squeezing or breaking things I'm holding. BREAK worked here, reducing my jewelled fruits to detritus, but also indicating that this was probably a mistake.

Those are the far extents of the game that I've found. They comprise the start of a character who has memories, possessions that add to that character (the clothes), others that are unexplained (the fruit), and a few locations recalling memories. The lyrical bent of these things is something, but there's not a game here and not enough resolution of what is to convey much else.

Given that I harped on the blurb, I should also point out that valley of glass's synopsis did describe it as "a reimagined moment alone from the folktale Black Bull of Norroway." Moments aren't long, unless you're in Inception. I personally anticipated a certain vibe here because of my acquaintance with Steeleye Span's take on a folk tale, but I expect most other IFCompers won't have that. Perhaps my review describes my process of acclimatising myself to the scale of valley of glass, which I had misapprehended. It never promised me puzzles or greater length, though it presented four geographical nodes that I could have sworn were going to lead to puzzles. I still don't think there's enough detail here to convey the import of the promised moment.