In this year’s Spring Thing, the next game I played was Hinterlands: Marooned! It turns out that this is a one-move game, but I had no idea going into it.

The game has you stranded on a very small island, standing next to a Q’udzlth. And almost everything you do will kill you. There are a lot of death sequences in this game, and they’re all very polished, like the author had a lot of fun killing the player. The only thing is, it’s not very fun to be killed repeatedly with no clue in the final text that could advance the story.

Hinterlands: Marooned! is a hard game with not a single clue that could get the player to the end. I can see why the author might not want a walkthrough with only one move, but hints need to be woven into something like this – to keep the player with the game, not laughing at them. After 40 minutes of dying, I gave up. I decided not to rate this one.