The plot is established immediately, and the bulk of the game is spent at that central task--eating something--since you have to gather the requisite objects from rather unlikely locales. For one of them, as it happens, you play a logic game of sorts with your friendly robot Suzy; the game is absent of explanations why you have only one said object in the house, or why Suzy would have it. (Plus--maybe this is just me--the game is _very_ frustrating; you can keep restarting in hopes of an easy starting position, but it isn't initially obvious what constitutes one, and one of two apparent goals isn't actually a solution.) A more artificial puzzle can scarcely be found in IF. Another is found in a logical spot, but you can't perform a logical action on it; you have to do what's required in a fairly ridiculous way. Another is in the proper room, but in a place that requires absurd lengths to reach. There's more: going outside requires your clothes, which requires opening the washing machine, which requires finding something to pry it open (is this the first time you've ever used this washer? why does it do this? why don't you have this object in a logical place?), which requires searching the house top to bottom because the premise requires a house in a mess with nothing in logical places and hence there's nowhere obvious to find this object. (And it's easy to miss, since EXAMINE the requisite hiding spot doesn't really help; you need SEARCH.) The clumsiest puzzle of all comes when you try to reenter the house after going outside--you have to work around an elaborate security system involving rotating gnomes and binary chop, except it's not binary chop as such. There are many and manifold problems here: for one thing, presumably you don't put up with this nonsense every time you want to open your door. So that would mean there's a key somewhere, but you don't know where it is, and given the state of your house, you're not likely to find it. So the gnomes are a security system. Fine, but it would be nice to have something like that mentioned, so that the player doesn't decide, oops, looks like I locked myself out of the house, guess I'll go back to a save position and hunt for a key somewhere. Better still, there might BE a key somewhere--in the pocket of jeans in the wardrobe or something, preferably not buried in a plant--that would give the player an alternative to that puzzle. Moreover--I dunno--I have a problem, realism-wise, with discovering through a long slow trial-and-error process something about your personal life or home, something that you're not actually likely to have forgotten. Yes, bouts of amnesia would get old as a plot element. This is really an argument against the whole "you're in your house" genre of games, which have darn near exhausted their interest for me. Finally, the game ends with a rather, um, distasteful development that took the whole thing down another notch or two in the fun department--basic bodily functions as a puzzle premise were not compelling in My First Stupid Game, and they're not a whole lot better here.

A Good Breakfast had a bug in its initial release that made it unfinishable (though, I must say, it was kind of a funny bug, especially given the setting--if you tried to put cornflakes in a bowl, you were told "That's not a place for cornflakes," which initially suggested to me that pouring them on the floor and gobbling them up might befit your living style a bit better). The author uploaded a fixed version after about a month or so, and judges had to decide for themselves what to say about the bug. My answer, flawed but the best I can come up with, is not to rate the game quite so far down as I originally had it, but still penalize the author somewhat--mistakes happen, but an unfinishable game really shouldn't. It may fairly be objected that I didn't do any such thing for A Bear's Night Out, which released a second version a few days into the contest, before I managed to download the game, and it's true--of course, the first version isn't available, and I don't know what changes were made. I don't, however, think that there were fatal bugs in the first version of that game. For what it's worth, I honestly don't think I'd penalize a game with minor errors that released a second, fixed version--but this, well, is a problem of a whole different order.

Where was I? Ah, yes. The frustrating thing about A Good Breakfast, as noted, is that it's really very funny in places; the author is clearly a witty fellow who spent a while injecting some wit into the game. Some of the "amusing" suggestions aren't, really, like sitting on the washing machine--perhaps I'm missing something there--but many are. There's even a game-within-a-game for the last lousy point, welcome because it's explicitly extraneous to the plot, not dragged in improbably, and also for its dig at fantasy IF. The multiplicity of references to British pop music--well, I dunno if this was the idea, but I found them funny just because they look so absurd written in a pop-up box. This isn't an indictment of British pop in particular; it's just that very little pop music actually passes the profundity test when written down and quoted out of context, and "Karma Police,/ Arrest this man,/ He talks in math,/ And buzzes like a fridge..." seemed so inane it was amusing. (Plus, for a non-follower of such things, the name "Chumbawumba" has a humor value all its own.) The robot's patter feels vaguely Teddy-Ruxpin-esque ("Mmmm, I love you!"), though with the benefit of absurdity, and there's one somewhat funny puzzle involving a next-door neighbor. (It doesn't make a lot of sense, but it's funny anyway.) And there's a generally wry view of your messy home that makes the game a little less tiresome than it might be, I guess--stepping out into your garden, or trying to, was particularly good. The writing is solid throughout--grammar is impeccable, rooms are well-described, many responses have the air of a hung-over person mumbling whatever rolls through his mind. It seems, in short, like all this good writing should have gone into a better game.

One might quite fairly defend A Good Breakfast by saying it sends up the class of games where you save the world, or at least several cute tearful orphans, by replacing it with a plot where you feed yourself and then--well, I certainly wouldn't want to spoil the ending. Sure, true, but lots of folks--in this competition, even--have already gotten there, and even those who appreciate this postmodern element in IF want _some_ sort of story. (We're not as thoroughgoing as we might be about our postmodernism, I guess.) Lots of games subvert this expectation or that, and some manage to be quite compelling. Here, though I recognize the author's skills, I must say I didn't enjoy the whole enterprise much. There's plenty of humor here, and the idea might well appeal to many, but I can't say it did to me; I give this a 4 on the competition scale.