Very neat to play this for the first time almost 15 years after release, put me back in the headspace I was in playing games like this in 2011. The last image you fade into "under the fields" is very striking.
It's a real treat to get a new favorite wuzzy game after following you and max's work for nearly a decade. This one's just a delight. The writing is wonderful throughout (in both the game and the guide), and I loved the pacing and progression and super-gorgeous maps. Felt a lot of feelings about these fish.
I've been in love with online freeware games for a long time, which has meant a lot of watching good creators fade away, good games go unsupported and eventually unhosted. But Terry's an old-guard dev that not only stuck around, not only successfully transitioned to making epic commercial games, but also kept making awesome small-scale games the whole time. And with this collection, he's assembled a whole mess of those games into a clean gorgeous package, one that'll be much easier to support and host for years to come. It makes me very happy to see a freeware dev show this much love to their back-catalogue.
I'm very glad Terry's commercial games have achieved so much success, and I adore them. But his titanic backlog of cool-as-hell one-off freeware releases is still the beating heart of his oeuvre to me. It means a lot to see such a loved-on package of these games, some of which I played almost twenty years ago. I hope through this collection they get the chance to inspire a new generation of wannabe devs the same way they inspired me.
Great domino-y story and aesthetic texture married to strong rpg fundamentals. Had a lot of fun mapping this one and scraping by the scary fights. Makes me wanna play a classic CRPG...
I know this is some inscrutable in-joke but it made me laugh very hard anyway. (For other players: I played near-optimally my second attempt and still game-over'd, I don't believe it's possible to successfully update TVTropes.)
Man... this one tapped into some self-destructive impulses I've felt when I was really low (in a good way). When you've been Extremely Online for a decade plus, you're gonna have some bad experiences with people that leave scars. It's very easy to start hedgehog's dilemma-ing after 'another' person you respected turned out to be a grifter, or someone that climbs the ladder and then pushes it down.
I don't know how much that resonates with the intended theming here, but it's what I thought of while playing it.
This fuckin' rips, natch. Gorgeous production, pitch-perfect banter. It's very cool that the unflinching sexuality and violence that defines a lot of your later games is already here in your first domino entry.
