Congratulations! review A game documenting care of a newborn would probably have to distort reality considerably to be exciting, and Congratulations! is regrettably faithful to the subject; the result, I'm sorry to say, is neither interesting nor informative. Aside from some humor here and there--only some of it, I think, intentional--there is little reason to download this one.

There's not much more plot here than you'd expect; you are a new parent (the game implies that you're a mother, but doesn't say so outright, I guess), at home attending to your baby's various needs, as signaled by "Baby cries!" (I echo C.E. Forman again: please give the kid a name. Makes everything a lot more personal.) There's a child care book on hand, but it's hard to consider "If your baby is hungry, you should feed it" a particularly penetrating insight into the situation at hand. (Another bit of advice, "Feed your baby and watch it grow," made it sound like we're talking about a Chia Pet here.) No, the objectives here are strictly common-sense--feed, change diaper, put to bed. There's also the option of murdering your baby, but the game does reprove you rather sharply if you do that. Nothing even mildly unexpected happens--which may be a comment on being a parent, though I don't think it's a very good one, since the nature of parenthood is dealing with the unexpected. Then again, newborns aren't capable of introducing a tremendous amount of novelty into the average day. Still, there aren't many responses indicating that you have much of a bond with this child, though you can always "kiss baby" (response: "The baby loves you too and wants you to take care of it"--I'm tryin', kid; don't pressure me). As the bond between parents and child is still forming in the first few weeks of the child's life, it might be nice to get more of that process. You get a prologue that suggests how committed you are to caring for your baby, but your emotions are entirely absent from the game thereafter. (Random thought--how interesting might this be if you were playing the child rather than the parent? Well, maybe not very, but it might be kind of intriguing.)

The coding is on the same level as the story. I practically starved the baby to death when I first tried this because I didn't figure out the syntax the author wanted for feeding it. (And it didn't make a lot of sense, even when I did figure it out.) The game's excuse for not letting you carry away the sofa cushions is "These cushions are too heavy to carry." There's a blender in the game that, along with being a handy way to murder your baby, apparently functions without benefit of a power cord, since you can carry it hither and yon. You get a "barfs on you" message whenever you examine the baby, whether or not you're holding it. You can "drop baby" without apparent ill effects. There's no way to dispose of dirty diapers.

Though I don't have children myself, I do actually think the idea has some potential, if only to demonstrate the volume of things that a parent has to think about when caring for a baby. No, as noted, it might not be riveting, but perhaps it's worth trying anyway. If it's over a certain age, will it run into or fall off something if it rolls over? If not, is it safely on its back so it won't smother? Are there small objects around that it might grab, try to swallow, and choke on? Are electrical outlets either out of reach or plugged with something? Is it eating properly? There are more things to worry about than in the most complicated fantasy quest. Of course, including lots of this stuff would involve conflating babies of different ages, but it should be possible either to confine the problems to one age level or somehow allow for different stages of the baby's development. (The Edifice, except stages of one child's life? That's not a bad idea.) Any fool knows that you're supposed to feed a baby, change its diapers, and put it to bed; any fool might not know about preventing diaper rash, warming a bottle, singing it to sleep, making a mobile for its crib...well, if anyone wants to expand on the idea here, I'd be happy to collaborate. But suffice it to say that being anointed Ready for More Children, as the game does at the end, felt a tad premature. (Oh dear--bad pun.)

Congratulations! is an interesting idea without much in the way of execution. I hope Frederick Hirsch will try again in some form; this effort gets a 2 from me.