I’m digging into this ParserComp entry, which is set up as a sort of (nonvideo) Her Story riff – the conceit is you’re researching some unspecified Bad Things that happened in the eponymous town, by searching the archives of the local newspaper. But I’m getting stymied pretty quickly.
Following the proper nouns cued in the initial set of search results pretty quickly got me to the article about Peter Gorden’s disappearance, but I was stuck there for a while. After trying some options and random, I found that MISSING got me a list of five other people who’d disappeared around the same time, and I thought that things would open up from the linear path there, as I could search and find info on each of them. But searching on their names doesn’t lead to any hits, nor does searching on their dates of disappearance, or anything else I can think of.
If anyone’s got any further or has thoughts on avenues to pursue, I’m all ears!
For me, the game does not work at all; it loads but hitting enter or clicking the word ‘search’ does nothing. Is there a different format for searching besides hitting enter?
Edit: Oh, I see, it only works for correct entries. I kept trying LENDON, but LSCC worked.
You’ve all got further than me. I had no idea what to do. I thought this must have been some sort of lead-in to the parser-based game, but I don’t think there’s a parser-based game to be found.
I couldn’t actually get it to do anything and am not sure whether it’s a parser game or not. It could be disqualified if it definitely isn’t, but I haven’t been able to get far enough past the opening screen to tell.
I found some entries which seem to explain what has been going on, but I don’t know whether that’s all there is to see, as I didn’t get any ending screen or other note to that effect.
I’m putting these into separate spoilers if people want to try step by step on their own:
Starting with LSCC, continue with Wozniak → Gorden → missing.
Starting with Kondiac, continue with Sidorov → donation → delivery.
@Warrigal, @ChristopherMerriner: The idea is that the player searches a database by entering keywords gleaned from the previous outputs. The input field is pre-filled with “Lendon” at the start, and the output mentions “LSCC”, so one is supposed to try “LSCC” to find out more, and then continue with any promising-looking search terms (typically, proper names and stuff like that).
In principle, it can be a cool game mechanic (in “Her Story” as mentioned above, and in text adventures where you can LOOK UP <something> IN DATABASE or CONSULT ENCYCLOPEDIA ABOUT <sth.>), but unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be very deeply implemented here.
Thanks. I’m not familiar with ‘Her Story’. All I knew about ‘Kondiac’ was that you have to look stuff up in a database. It starts with an image and a text box and that’s it. There doesn’t appear to be any instructions or background or objective, so you don’t even know what you’re supposed to be looking for.
I think I’ll leave this one until last, as there are too many other good games to try.
Thanks! I forgot to mention that I’d gotten the first two – that’s how I got lscc but I hadn’t thought to try donation since that was right after I started the game and I was operating on the assumption that searching a newspaper database for a broadly-used word like that wouldn’t accomplish much…
Another foible that tripped me up is that white space messes up the search, which must be using a pretty brute-force matching algorithm; I tried a couple of phrases and then their constituent parts (kondiac police department for example) and then realized that just deleting unneeded words isn’t enough, you need to get errant spaces out too. Plus full names don’t appear to be recognized – Peter and Gorden work but not Peter Gorden.
Anyway as you say the what is pretty clearly established; the why still seems mysterious but not sure it’s worth trying to get further blood from this stone.
According to author’s post on reddit, the game is 9 pages long. So, keyword entries that @StJohnLimbo listed in his post are complete walkthrough for this game. Author also confirmed there is no ending screen.
I got back to this one and independently arrived at what I thought was the ending screen. I had found seven words, but @StJohnLimbo found eight. That’s eight screens, plus the opening screen (Lendon), so that’s the complete game.