Life has been insane for a few months but I’ve settled and Parsercomp looks delicious. So I’ll play some of them and say things about them. I don’t know if I’ll play them all.
I’ll always go to Art’s game first. And this one is a joy. I can’t say much about it without spoiling it for you, but it’s short with terse yet evocative writing, it’s alphabet-focused, and its command set is extremely minimal as is usual for Art. The hardest thing about it is getting started-- hopefully others will tweak faster than I did to what’s going on. Once you do, the game is quite easy, teasing your brain a little but eminently solvable without any hints. One of the best things about puzzly parser IF if that little zing you get from figuring it out, the zing that makes you feel smart. And I got that with Eye. If you have trouble getting started, stick with it, because the payoff is worth it.
Edit: I see from my notes that it might be possible to win the game without finishing it, as there’s an area I didn’t get to (the Store Room). This makes me nervous because Art has a history of ending a game but having hours more game to play after the end. I’ll go back and see what I missed.
Two language-centered, limited-command games in a row! What a nice gift. This felt very experimental to me-- it’s a fairly short game in which the mechanism is word-swapping to repair jumbled sentences that ultimately tell a tragic story. The first 3 or 4 repairs I did were really fun and engaging, and if it got to be a tad of a grind for the last one, that’s OK because the whole thing felt very novel. It’s all leading to some lovely wordplay at the end which brings the narrative threads of the repaired sentences together in a pleasing way. It’s really nice to see people rattling the bars of the parser cage and trying to expand what a parser game looks like. This game succeeded at that.
This game was exactly what I needed right now. A traditional text adventure with equal parts horror and humor, an endearing PC, a big map, and a zippy story. This one is a little on the easier side, although sometimes the answer was so easy that it stumped me. For instance, I tried forever to dip the quill in the blood, put blood on quill, put blood in nib, etc before just trying writing once I had the blood. Killing the witch was also startlingly simple. The trouble with games that have an old-fashioned level of granularity-- like having to get something out of your pack before using it, or having to open doors before going through them-- is that you expect that level of granularity for everything. These are very minor quibbles, though, since the game as a whole was so well-paced, well-clued, and engaging. In short, you’re a 10-year-old chess nerd visiting your aunt, and things go pear-shaped fast, plunging you into the kind of adventure that every 10-year-old nerd dreams about and fears in equal measures.
4.) Wild West by BDB Project (not sure who that is)
A short, simple little game that is exactly what it appears to be- a wild west story. I admit to great relief when the Indians wouldn’t take my whiskey as a peace offering-- I was like, oh please no, and thankfully the game told me no, quite firmly. Whew.
It took me less than 10 minutes, so there’s not much to say about it except that it’s a solid little game that I enjoyed.
I’ve been playing more of Eye, and it gets better and better. Really, go play it. It’s a master class in game design. Everything I write is so bloated and wordy, but Art can do so much with so little. Bravo.
The BDB Project is a team formed by @Warrigal and I (@g0blin). “Wild West” is the first game in the Kenneth Johnson Trilogy. The full project will be disclosed soon (probably shortly after ParserComp ends).
I’m going to be the one to say: I didn’t get it… And I couldn’t get past the first problem (i.e. what the heck does it want me to type??)
I guess I’ll try again
(ref. Eye)
Yeah, it has three big places where it wants you to look at everything you know and try to figure out not only what the solution is but maybe what the logic of the puzzle is (or what the puzzle even is). Some people love that but while I do tend to get sucked into the challenge of proving that “why yes, I am the kind of person who can solve this” I don’t really enjoy the process that much. And then the puzzles in between were often too straightforward for my taste: often more typing than thinking for me, and a lot of "did you do the bookkeeping, or do you have to walk around and check everything again?
But there’s some fun stuff in there and I put together a quick walkthrough that tries a little bit to let you solve the puzzles while also walking you straight past the what/where even is the puzzle questions that aren’t so much my thing… so don’t look if that’s going to spoil your fun, but it would let you past the first “what do I type” and into the game proper if you want.
I see what you’re saying here… And actually I had an idea of something to try even as I wrote my previous message! (Remembering what the game is called is a help!)
Although I’m away so I haven’t actually tried this…
I’m playing Witchever and enjoying it, but am a little stuck. Giving it a rest to try something else.
I tried The Last Audit of the Damned by Thoughtaction (anyone know who that is?) but the spinning wheel of waiting between turns was just too long and I lost interest, although the game looked good. Is that just me?
That’s very possible. It was variable-- between 10 and 30 seconds between turns. Which is too long. I appreciate the difficulties in making new systems work, but I’ll beat the same drum I always do: if it’s not smoothly and easily playable, I won’t play it. There’s just too much IF out there to futz with things that make me wait.
No-- I got past the underground maze and I have yet to figure anything else out-- not the wall or the castle or how to use the bathtub or the spinning tree or the face. I think there are so many things I haven’t done and I have so much in my inventory that it overloaded my circuits. There are only about a zillion things to try and I don’t feel like there’s anything that particularly stands out for me to do next. So maybe I’ll come back to it later.
