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manonamora-if-reviews · 11 months ago

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The Tin Mug by Alice E. Wells, Sia See and Jkj Yuio

============= Links

Play the game See other reviews of the game

============= Synopsis

The Tin Mug is a short illustrated children's story of around 10 minutes. Meet the Tin Mug and his friends, Colin the colander, Silvia the spoon and Stu the stew pot as well as several others. Find out what happens in the magic of the Mug's birthday!

============= Other Info

The Tin Mug is a Strand game, submitted to the 2022 Edition of the IFComp. It ranked 51st overall.

Status: Completed Genre: Fantasy, Children's story

CW: /

============= Playthrough

First played: 3-Oct-2022 Played: 13-Dec-2023 Playtime: around 15min Rating: 3 /5 Thoughts: But we investigate little...

============= Review

The Tin Mug is a fairly short choice-game where you play as a tin mug, on its birthday. It is a fairly linear story, with the binary choices leading to the same ending. The game is maybe more meant for children, but it's enjoyable nonetheless.

Spoilers ahead. It is recommended to play the game first. The review is based on my understanding/reading of the story.

Though it is your birthday - as a tin mug - you are faced with many challenges: fancier china and crockery looking down on you for being so cheep, rowdy children not caring much for things, and well... the lack of birthday wishes. Through trials and tribulations, things take a charming turn, leading to a well deserved send-off. It is simple but hits the mark. Good deeds always pay off.

And had cute illustrations to accompany the text!

While it was very cute, I struggled most with the program used for this game. Strand is a parser-choice hybrid format (though it uses only the choice mechanic here), where the formatting of the text leave to be desired. - For longer passages, the program would force you to scroll back to the top of the added text to pick the story up from your last choice. This was particularly egregious when illustrations were added through the new bits of text. - As for the illustrations, their scaling didn't quite work, covering often too much of the page, forcing you to zoom out to get it in full. - Often, the dialogue would be formatted in ways that made it difficult to distinguish who was speaking when, as the speaker would change multiple times within one line/paragraph.

It is an entry with lots of heart, but needs a little tweaking still.

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OG Review during the IFComp:

Among the swarm of serious, scary and strenuous entries, it is nice to find sweet and soft ones to balance it out. Like Esther’s, The Tin Mug is a short children story with a lovely heart. The Tin Mug uses his birthday to do some good deeds :slight_smile:

While it was very cute, I had some issues with it (I think most of them are related to the program used):

The way the dialog was formatted made it often difficult to distinguish between speakers (some line/paragraphs would change speaker multiple times).

After some options, the text would move so far up, that you had to scroll to catch up. It mainly happened when new chapter started and when an illustration you appear.

In a similar vein, I feel like the game would benefit from breaks between chapters by starting a new page altogether.

Aside from the last illustration, I think the pictures are too large. I had to zoom out for some of them to get it in full.

Your choices make very little difference. There is a slight variation in the text, but the story is very much a straight line.

Overall, a fun cute play.

#The Tin Mug #Alice E. Wells #Sia See #Jkj Yuio #interactive fiction #complete #2022 #review #ifcomp #custom system

2 notes · View notes

uhbasicallyjustmilex · 2 months ago

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