IFComp 2023
Hey, listen! PYHITPH is an unequivocal recommendation. Put it on your must-play list!
With that out of the way, I'll admit that I wasn't very good at this game, and only retrieved seven of the fourteen Handfuls. In particular, I never engaged with learning the guard routines, which significantly limited what I could achieve on my first playthrough. But I still had a great time!
What Worked For Me
First: To my mind, this is an amazing sweet spot for mechanical depth in a Twine story: A navigable and stateful world, a limited inventory, more than a dozen characters, and the combinations of these into a huge possibility space full of bespoke content. We've seen “crunchier” Twine games that go full-roguelike, perhaps working against the grain of the engine to create large experiences. But this feels like the very deep end of working *with* the engine's strengths. At times I forgot I wasn't playing a parser game. I'm sure it was a staggering effort to build and test.
Second: What a great concept! I love the Muppets, something this game captures beautifully is how that love extends to the people and process that brought them to life.
It also captures how vividly alive these characters are, in the semi-surreal way the Handfuls are brought to life: It's fairly clear that the player character is puppetting them and providing their voice, but they're written as fully autonomous persons, whose actions and opinions can surprise the PC, much as we'd see Kermit or Elmo come alive for a child even though we know the child *must* see the puppeteer just off-camera. (And in a great bit of magical realism, the Handfuls do know things the PC doesn't, and even speak in Mal's voice later in the story.) This wouldn't be possible without some excellent writing.
Third: I was constantly surprised by the depth being revealed in the game, and enjoyed digging through character backstories and reading the dialogue revealed by bringing two Handfuls together on a run. And I clearly missed a lot of this content! I need to go back.
What Worked Less Well
I did not guess that the guards' movements would be predictable, and I lost Ernest (who is one of the hint systems) to a guard fairly early in the game. So I did a fair bit of running into buildings and hoping I'd be lucky enough to not get caught. Fortunately there is another hint system (the getaway driver) but I also struggled with some of the hints. For example, the one about looking near air vents for taken Handfuls never made sense to me - I only found the air vents in one building, and visiting them never seemed to help me retrieve a Handful. There was also a bit of dialogue about one of the Handfuls scaring away the guards, which didn't seem to work in practice - I was captured anyway. Given more time I'm sure I could get to know the systems at play better, but it was a challenge while playing for the comp.
Overall What a lovingly-crafted thing. Easily worth your time.