Just Right

Intro

"Just Right" was a submission for the Twisted Fairy Tales event for Halloween of 2018 and was about taking classic fairy tales and putting a dark spin on them. A task that seems kind of weird considering a lot of these fairy tales originally had darker endings like the little mermaid turning into sea foam or sleeping beauty being raped in Basile's version and awakened by one of her twin children sucking the splinter out of her finger and thus awakening her.

So putting a dark spin on these tales just seems like an attempt to bring them back into alignment with their source material if you ask me. Though, I suppose most people are more familiar with the Disney versions of these tales which are a lot more tame and tend to feature the phrase "happily ever after". If anything I suppose one can argue which of the many versions of these stories should be considered the cannon version of events or if all of these different takes on the story should be considered alternate universe tales.

Story

At any rate, I should probably move onto discussing how AlaskanEmily decided to twist Goldilocks and the Three Bears. A story that originates from 19th century Britian and originally featured an old lady that eats some soup, breaks a chair, and is so scared of the bears she throws herself out a window and is never seen again. It would latter be made more kid friendly by replacing the old lady with a young girl named Goldilocks and tamed even more by replacing the three bears with a papa bear, mama bear, and a baby bear.

In AlaskanEmily's version the bears run a hamburger joint where they offer complaining customers refunds, but this is merely a ruse to lure them into the back where they can eat them, but in order to avoid the game being too short the player is helped by a blue fairy who helps the player escape into an air vent. From there they need to crawl through the vents to another room and solve a puzzle in order to find hints to a dark secret, but before we can dig deeper into the mystery we pass out and awaken on the sidewalk a few blocks from home.

So I suppose will never know why the three bears are running a burger joint or the dark secret at the heart of it all. And maybe that's for the best since the real power of certain stories is in the mysteries surrounding them. After all, every attempt to explain why the immortals were immortal in the Highlander franchise only served to piss people off. The appeal was in the mystery. So fans preferred being able to speculate about it and didn't want a definitive answer.

Gameplay

Outside of clicking around in order to find your next destination point the game features a pair of puzzles that will only serve to annoy the player. This is because the rules of these puzzles aren't explained to the player which makes solving them a bigger pain in the backside then it needs to be. Admittedly the first puzzle is pretty easy to figure out on your own and the game simply resets the puzzle when you fail. So there isn't any pressure to work out the solution on your first try.



But figuring out a game about board control that is meant to be similar to something like Go is one thing. Working out the second puzzle that involves a small idol moving back and forth depending on the colors you mix and the order you mix them in is another. Without any knowledge of the rules the player is forced to experiment until they either work out the rules through trial and error or solve the puzzle with sheer brute force by trying every combination of moves they can think of. Regardless of which route you take the game is super annoying since the developer could have saved you a lot of time and effort by simply giving you a rules list to try and work out what the optimal series of moves is. Instead it took me the better part of thirty minutes to crack the final puzzle and I found myself being frustrated at AlaskanEmily for not including an explanation for how the puzzle works the entire time.

Graphics

The game features some original art that looks decent enough if a bit bland in some cases.



Though, I don't know if I could make the inside of a vent any more appealing.



The bears themselves look pretty good, but why they breathe fire is beyond me. Maybe there secretly part dragon. Though what you'd call a cross between a bear and dragon is beyond me.

Though the game does have some issues with consistency. At least when it comes to the size of the main character's arm.



Sound

The game features some original music that does a decent job at ratcheting up the tension while your playing, but will be forgotten about as soon as the game is over.

Conclusion

I suppose this take on the story is twisted and filled with more gore and death than most other takes on this story. At the same time that puzzle involving the idol and mixing various colors pissed me off so much that I wished I could breathe fire like the bears can in order to melt my monitor in order to vent some of my frustration. If the game did a better job explaining the puzzles I'd probably recommend this game as a decent time killer, but as it stands I'd recommend staying away from this one.