Sweet Street

[h2]A garden, and whoever calls at it[/h2]

Sweet Street is a quiet game about an Edwardian front garden and the animals that wander into it. You put things out — a saucer, a wicker basket, a boot scraper, a bee skep — and then you wait. Cats come over the fence. Which ones come, and how long they stay, depends on what is out and on what you have worked out about them.

Nothing here is timed against you. The garden carries on while you are away, and coming back is how you find out what happened.

[h2]What you do[/h2]

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[*][b]Set the garden out.[/b] Eighty objects, each one a different invitation. Some are beds, some are food, some are simply odd enough to be worth investigating.

[*][b]Notice things.[/b] Thirty cats, each with her own likings, and nobody tells you what they are. The catalogue writes pencil notes only from visits you actually saw, and the shopkeeper's gossip about each object is the other half of the puzzle.

[*][b]Feed them.[/b] Kitchen scraps bring the ordinary cats of the street, reliably. A tin of sardines brings the ones from further off. A saucer of cream brings the fussy and the well-kept.

[*][b]Collect.[/b] An animal that visits often enough leaves you a keepsake. The catalogue fills. So does the shelf.

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[h2]Nine places[/h2]

The garden is where it starts. There is a parlour with a fire in it, a bedroom where the cats that know the house settle on the quilt, a park with a bandstand, a wood where the dog is properly walked, a farm with ponies in knitted jumpers, and a glass lean-to you build yourself — where the rain runs down the panes and none of it gets in.

[h2]The year turns[/h2]

Seasons pass in fortnights. Snow settles for the whole of winter. Cold weather makes visitors stay longer. A wet week used to be a dead week — until the glasshouse is built, and then it is the reason the garden is full.

[h2]Every voice is made from scratch[/h2]

There are no sample libraries in Sweet Street. Every meow, bark, whinny and piece of birdsong is synthesised from published measurements of how those animals make sound: vocal fold length, the resonances of the throat, and the way roughness arrives in short bursts at the peak of effort rather than running all the way through a call. It is why a big dog and a small dog sound like different animals rather than the same animal pitched down.

The music is the real thing — public-domain Edwardian compositions and recordings, heard through a wall, under rain, from the next room.

[h2]What this game will not do to you[/h2]

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[*]Nothing dies, nothing is punished, and being away never costs you anything.

[*]No energy bar, no lives, no timer running down while you are not looking.

[*]No advertising.

[*]Money buys pennies and commissions, and nothing else. Every catalogue entry, every keepsake and every rare animal's conditions are unreachable with money — not as a promise in a document, but as a property of the code, with a test suite that fails if it ever stops being true.

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