And then write up the insights gained during the conversation as a Rosebush article? 
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Ah, it looks like you spun up an entire IF crit site when I wasn’t looking. That’s fantastic! I have some articles to read. It also seems like I missed the 2023 IF top 50 vote, darn.
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Barcarolle in Yellow
I have a soft spot for IFComp 2016’s Ariadne in Aeaea, because 2016 was when I started judging and reviewing comps, and it was my favourite from that year. 1958: Dancing With Fear was the follow-up by that author, and it was also quite good. Just like both of those games, Barcarolle in Yellow’s strengths lie in its sense of setting and character; all three are stand-outs in that area. But this one isn’t quite as polished as the others. It just felt like it just needed a bit more time before it hit the stage.
This starts off strong, with an INCREDIBLE opening. It’s cinematic, confident, and unique. You’re actress Eva Chantry. It’s 1975. As the game properly starts, you’ve been given a train ticket to Venice, to star in a new Giallo film (Giallo is apparently an italian cinema term, which, quoting from Wikipedia, is a “genre of murder mystery fiction that often contains slasher, thriller, psychological horror, sexploitation, and, less frequently, supernatural horror elements”). How exciting! But wait, is there someone following you?
One of the differences with this as opposed to Ariadne and 1958 is that Eva is not nearly as independently driven as the protagonists in those games. Ariadne was strong-willed and proactive, and In 1958, the protagonist has a specific plan of action they’re trying to enact (I could be slightly wrong since it’s been so long since I’ve played either). Here, Eva is often following directions and being told what to do. That’s part of the story: she’s just an actor, following what the studio and director wants her to do, and part of the commentary of the story is about how exploited she is. But the story also has some later twists that Eva doesn’t really seem to have much reaction to. Eva mostly just seems… scared. And the player can’t really do anything about any of it. So I never really stopped to try to process the proceedings, and I don’t really know how to feel about any of the late developments (the ending sequence revelations, the fourth wall breaks) because I couldn’t fully tell you what happened as it starts drifting into more surreal territory. The story felt very back-loaded. Lines get blurred between actor and character, but… the story never established any separation between the two to begin with. There’s commentary on Eva “aging out” of her role which is a neat idea… Perhaps because I’m not familiar with this genre of film, I might not have gotten all the references and tropes.
The city is described quite well. It’s portioned in terms of broader districts, and described from a more touristy perspective. But it also feels like there’s no one IN the city. It’s descriptions that would work well if I was just walking through all of it once, but Barcarolle has me criss-crossing the city 4 or 5 times. I also got stuck on a puzzle and had to scour the city a couple more times, and I also wandered around a few more beyond that just to see what was around, and to see if the game would let me, which it does. (I’ll again shout out last year’s Spring Thing game The Weight of a Soul, which also takes place in a city, but does really well to make it come alive, more than in any other parser game I can recall) What Barcarolle’s city actually ends up containing outside of the big transitory districts are five buildings in certain locations. Each of those interiors might contain one person inside. If you go up to that person and try to engage with them outside of when they’re involved in a puzzle, they don’t really want to interact with you. The city is open, but it doesn’t really reward you for looking around. The first morning after you arrive, you’re told that you’re late and you need to get to the movie studio, but after that you can just wander around the city, and the game doesn’t really rush you, or acknowledge that you have something else you should be doing.
The game rushes you other times though. There’s a very strictly timed sequence when you first arrive, and I misjudged when the sequence actually starts, so I spent a lot of time dying over and over. I thought the sequence started when I dropped the scarf, but I kept dying in front of the hotel and I also spent a lot of time trying to enter the gallery. The city works fine here, but because the description tells me that I can ENTER the gallery, I kept trying to do it that first night; I thought it was maybe a bug (hey the game told me I could ENTER!), since I would die if I tried to keep moving. Looking back at the transcript, I think the issue is that I tried to LOOK when I first stepped outside the station. Then I dropped the scarf. And I never undo’ed far back enough. I eventually just restarted.
The rest of that first night was back to creating a really neat atmosphere though: entering the hotel, getting things sorted out at reception, going up and getting settled in, that part is all really nice. It feels like getting into character. There are other more story-driven moments that are immersive like this. And the strength of writing is always there as well. This is generally fairly linear, with a lot of narrow goals. Although the few puzzles aren’t tough, they do seem quite fickle. There’s the timed sequence I mentioned before, and I also had trouble with Eva’s first filmed scene; I think it was slightly on me for missing a script step, but the game also doesn’t give much feedback when I did something wrong there.
I could definitely be wrong with this, but I’m thinking that I might’ve preferred LESS map freedom? Talking to shop NPCs that don’t have anything to say just felt a bit bad. Rebuke me from wandering around the city as much (“Eva, you’re late, what are you doing?”), don’t let me enter the shops until I need to in the story. I’m trying to figure out how this matches with my reaction to Beat Witch, which I said was a bit too linear and guided. Maybe it wouldn’t help. But preventing me from going somewhere is still a response to an action. The character is sort of enforcing their own autonomy in that case, and it tells me something about them. The default error message (well, an early one) is Eva telling herself to stop disassociating; it maybe showed up a bit too often as a catchall default, but it’s also a unique character response for a game, which I always enjoy. Cordoning off parts of the map is a type of restriction that doesn’t feel as bad to me as timed sections where I’m just not able to find the exact command(s) needed. It also matches with the story in this case, and keeps me more focused on the story goals.
This has some really strong, compelling ideas. It’s very close to having all the elements of an incredible game. Still lots to like about this: the premise and setting is more enticingly presented than anything else I’ve played this comp. It just needed a bit more fine-tuning: puzzle leniency, some minor scattered typos, a slightly more spread out story, and some more responses to things.
Ending I got
*** ENDING E: CULTIST ***
transcript: barcarolle.txt (184.1 KB)
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My Pseudo-Dementia Exhibition
Why do we take pictures? I was going to try to answer that, but let’s try Googling it first! The FLORIDA MUSEUM of PHOTOGRAPHIC ARTS has a blog post about this ( Why do we take pictures? • FMoPA | Florida Museum of Photographic Arts | Tampa, Florida); it talks about “solidifying our personal experiences, and stories from our point of view.” It also talks about how social media has altered the act of photo taking because we can share photos with the world now, for better and for worse. “Sharing an image can influence other perceptions, and through a reverse effect it influences the way you feel about a particular experience.”
Photos are about preserving memories. I think that’s ultimately it, right? You use them to remember a moment. For our future selves, or for others.
Games can do that too. We might make them to share with others. We might even make them for ourselves. Some of my thoughts about Twine came up in the Dysfluent review: the idea about Twine as a platform for sharing more personal stories with others. In last year’s A Single Orobouros Scale: A Post-Mortem, the author wrote about such similar reasons. How, in the midst of the severe dementia they write more directly about here, they worried about… dying. And they wanted to make one more game, one more act of self-documentation and self-recognition, to share with the world before that happened.
Museums are also about preserving memories. Memories of our past. My Pseudo-Dementia Exhibition is presented as a museum exhibit. Throughout their sometimes-harrowing recovery from severe dementia across several months and medical facilities, the author documents their journey with photographs, and the photographs serve as the exhibits within the “museum” space here. We view these images, and alongside each image is a little placard story. The stories are detailed and journalistic–wait, that might not be the right term, scratch that-- detailed and diary-like. They’re personal, and express personal opinions: about good and bad doctors, and estranged family, and friends made along the way. Photos, of pieces of art, pieces of writing, physical objects, all preserved here. I think museums traditionally tend to be maybe a bit more interpretive; with these stories, it becomes more like a personal photo essay, one with an indie soundtrack score in the background.
It’s a journey spread across several “wings” of exhibits. There’s a footstep effect between each wing, which I quite liked. It gave some breathing room between the spaces. You move through and examine things by clicking on links, and the links have some some of fuzzy effect when you hover over them. The blocks of text, I’ll say did feel a bit cramped (the margins around the passages were a bit narrow); it wasn’t entirely pleasing on my eyes, and I briefly wondered if it was intentional–the link effect after all are also hard to read–but regardless, this is text-heavy, so making the text as easy to read as possible seems like it’d be important, right? (This is the type of mechanical design choice that is quite easy to express an opinion about, as opposed to some of the more deeply personal elements.)
I liked the details within the stories, the specificity of the things that stand out in their memories. The small gifts, the notebooks, the discovery of discontinued fast food items during their time in treatment… because time waits for no one.
Why take pictures? To document? To share? To remember? To be remembered?
Why write?
I’m glad to have played through this. That’s all.
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Thank you so much for your thoughtful and detailed review of Dysfluent! I really enjoyed reading your analysis of the game and I was fascinated by the stories you shared.
(I’ve always been curious about This American Life, and I think this is my sign to finally go check it out!)
You make many great points and observations about various aspects of the game; most of them I had pondered myself, and ended up choosing one way or the other based on tester feedback and/or my own gut feeling. I think you’re totally right that many of these choices ended up having drawbacks which unfortunately detract from the experience! But I’m very happy to hear that you still liked it, overall. 
Thanks again for your very valuable and heartening feedback – I’m really looking forward to exploring the weight and impact of all these design choices in the postmortem!
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I’m looking forward to your post-mortem! And ones for any of the other games I played! I always love reading them, always interested to see how design decisions were made.
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Milliways: The End of the Universe
(I know there’s a post-comp release planned, so some of this will probably be obsolete very soon. A lot of this is just talking about timed “X turns until death” sequences, really)
I’ll admit I was slightly apprehensive about delving into this one after playing the Witch. Which isn’t a knock against either game, but: this is listed as 2 hours+, and also explicitly tells me that it’s got a Zarfian scale of “cruel.” Warning labels are always appreciated, and why shouldn’t I heed them? I didn’t get too far into that one, I’m just not in the mood to delve into harder games right now.
But I thought I’d poke my head in. Perhaps I won’t judge either since I haven’t really played enough.
The game is a sequel to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the classic IF game. I’ve read every Hitchhiker’s series book, and loved all of them! But I don’t remember a lot of specifics. I also didn’t get too far into the game (when that movie came out, they put the game on the film website, I played it then). I remember getting on board the ship at least, getting just a bit further past that (and I quite liked the opening part). Regardless…
I know timed text gets a bad rep from some players, but what about sections where you die in a certain number of turns if you don’t solve them fast enough? I’ve played a surprising amount of games which feature them so far this year. Beat Witch is actually fairly low on my Annoyotron meter for this sort of thing: you got a handful of turns to perform an action before you die, but it’s often only one action, and even if it didn’t telegraph the right move all the time, it’s still just one UNDO to try something else. What Milliways and Barcarolle in Yellow before this both do is give you a short timing window to perform MULTIPLE actions before you die. And that’s a bit more aggravating, needing either multiple undos or constant saving. I got briefly stuck in Barcarolle, I’m pretty sure, because I didn’t UNDO quite far enough. A stray, early LOOK command got me killed over and over, one single errant action! Milliways has that in the second puzzle (the first one is solved with a single action and I did manage to make it unsolvable since I dropped the radio on the ledge, so still required a lot of undoing, but slightly better). For the aliens, if you trigger and then miss another timing window, I’m pretty sure you don’t get another chance. You’ll have to wait around a while before you get killed.
It did have a neat overall atmosphere; there’s some good description writing and imagination on display. Perhaps not to the level of actual Douglas Adams, but absolutely fine. But a bit further in, the game starts to feel more underdeveloped. We start to see more default descriptions (Even for other Hitchhiker’s Guide characters? Ford, Trillian?).
And some bugs. The cupboard seemed buggy; sometimes it wouldn’t open and close when I was in the kitchen, then eventually it would open and display two separate items (so it looked like it was firing twice). And then eventually it crashed Lectrote.
I stopped there. I did look at hints for the radio (that puzzle’s probably fair enough really) the aliens (that one is on me not examining everything, though again, I just got punished for this in Barcarelle), and the cupboard. There’s effort here certainly; charm, the puzzles are interesting, the writing is interesting. I see the thought that went into all the puzzles I saw. I think the author wrote somewhere that this was their first game, in which case, GREAT for a first effort. Incredible ambition. But needs more testing, needs more time in the oven. Possibility that some of these bugs are ZIL related, maybe modern interpreters don’t play well with it. But wow, this is written in ZIL! That’s cool! The difficulty I suppose is more subjective, but I feel like there needs to at least be a FEW turns of leniency for the player to look around and examine everything, before oblivion comes for them. I get it, OG Hitchhiker’s Guide also had timed deaths. But the beginning of that gives you a lot of turns, and some advance notice before you die. So that sequence works. Very possible the rest of that game also gets more unfair (I do remember hearing it’s very hard) in which case, hey, maybe it’s just nailing the spirit it was going for. Can’t fault it for that.
Aside: for the puzzle involving the darkness, that one seemed extremely familiar. Where you’re listed all your senses, and have to notice the missing one. Which other game is that from? (Is it just from Hitchhiker’s? that… would make sense)
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Thanks for the review! Many of the things you mentioned (cupboard bugs, some default responses) are already fixed (as far as I can tell). I understand the whole timed death thing (by timed I assume you mean by turn, not by seconds), it’s pretty cruel. The radio you do get many warnings, just the timer never decreases (in my head it permanently damages your brain), and if you want some help it’s that I noticed some testers trying CHANGE CHANNEL, so when not using the radio you can do so to slow the timer.
And yes, the senses puzzle in the Dark is a main reference to the original Hitchhiker’s!
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How Prince Quisborne the Feckless Shook His Title
TADS game. It reminds me in a way of early/mid 90s fare, when games were still large and ambitious in scope but had maybe backed off a bit on the cruelty scale. This has 300 potential points! This has a points system! I finally stopped at… 22 points.
Medieval fantasy setting, not overly serious. Very much an adventure. The king in unimpressed with his son, potential heir to the throne and the titular feckless prince. You are a mighty knight and renowned hero, and the king asks you to take on the boy as a squire, and you also take it upon yourself to prep the prince for his regal duties. Also the king has a rival you might have to deal with… and oh by the way, the king wants you to deliver his prized rutabagas to be entered at a festival.
So this has been lovingly worked on and pored over. I’m reminded of another parser game which had fairly long dialogue scenes which objectively could’ve been cut down. But it was evident that author really enjoyed writing them, and my thinking for that was, hey, these are almost all free, hobbyist passion projects anyways; how much could I really hate on that? If the author enjoys it, wants to put it in anyways, I can look past it a little bit, as long as the author knows and makes that choice, right? This game has evidently made similar verbosity choices.
The introduction has two versions the player can choose to read, a like 10-minute odyssey, and an abridged one. This has almost certainly gone through a ton of testing, and the author made the choice to keep the longer one as an option anyways but added the abridged one afterwards. I read through both; is the longer one superfluous? Um, yes. Ideally, the abridged version plus maybe two of the little side stories would’ve been good I think. But can I tell the author enjoyed writing the long version? Also, yes. In fact the longer intro has a more free-wheeling farcical tone that isn’t found quite as much in the game proper.
The in-game writing also shares the same verbosity. Paragraphs–at least one, perhaps more–for every single person place and thing within eyesight. I legitimately don’t recall examining ANYTHING that didn’t have a description for it. The favor that the king asks you to do at the start, in a “by the way” off-hand manner, is to pick up some rutabagas to bring to the festival you’re going to. So you head off with the prince in tow. And this seemingly breezy sidequest took me, I think, more than an hour, not because the puzzles were hard–they were quite standard ones: get past a dog, find a light source, find a key, etc–but because there’s so much text to process. The text is fine, well written; it’s more focused on either world-building or visually describing how things are laid out, though I’m not a very visual person so maybe not quite as effective for me.
Throughout this little quest, the prince is active: every single turn, the prince is examining something, singing something, doing something. Another one of the strengths of this game is how dynamic it feels, how things are always happening the background. What the prince doesn’t do, is… have anything to do on this sidequest. You order him to move some stuff around, that’s about it. Maybe if these were puzzles that blocked me off from the festival directly? Maybe if the prince had been tasked with bringing the rutabagas, and I was helping him instead of the other way around? But it’s a story about a prince where I’m doing stuff he isn’t really a part of.
And then after the sidequest is finally done, and there’s an author’s note thanking me as a judge, there’s another choice of either a long or abridged scene at the festival, and then the game map suddenly opens up. And you can just go ANYWHERE. There’s a fantastic illustrated map feelie that I had pulled up in another window to consult. There’s another quest, this one actually prince-centered. You’re told that your destination is somewhere north. and you start moving. There’s small towns, crossroads, fields, forests and mills along the way. It’s not just a straight shot north. Sometimes when you enter the village it’ll just tell you you spend some time there. Sometimes you’ll enter an inn and get another scene before it spits you back out. The prince keeps doing stuff in the background. Every once in a while, after travelling a while you’ll get a scene where you set up camp for the night. This is all structurally wildly different from the prologue (the ABOUT section tells me that the prologue puzzles are different from the rest of the game), and it’s more fascinating to me then the fairly normal puzzles + loads of reading that the prologue offered me. But then I got to my destination, a frozen lake is blocking my way, and I’m just told to keep exploring the countryside. I loaded up the game the next day, kept exploring. I think I have a few potential puzzle pieces at the end of that, but I did find all the description reading to be a bit exhausting after a while. Because I don’t know what I’m looking for, I really needed to concentrate on poring over all the words: room descs, everything mentioned IN the room descs, things happening in the background… I’m examining everything, and I’m also having to genuinely navigate with the map, in locations that will actually just splinter off in seven other potential directions (so I have to mentally remember which directions I’ve already gone)… So I did feel a bit tired by the end of that session and had to stop; I mostly explored without actually solving anything, and without necessarily knowing what else I would do next other than to KEEP exploring. I’m well over 2 hours at this point. The large map was very cool to explore, but I personally would’ve liked a slight bit more direction. The initial trip north was great. Purposefully planning where to go next would been cool considering the map. But I just trekked across half the countryside, and boy are my eyes tired!
Aside here about the passage of time in parser IF. I think in a lot of games time sort of just stand still, right, while you’re solving puzzles? Nothing actually proceeds, except maybe after solving a puzzle. This and Barcarolle in Yellow both acknowledge the passage of time (You’re told you’re late in Barcarolle at one point; you’re constantly automatically stopping and resting here so days are passing). But they also take place in large scale maps: respectively walking around Venice, and just walking around a whole kingdom. It… breaks the idea of the world for me a bit, because I’m imagining time passing when I’m inefficiently wandering around and criss-crossing the map.
I think what it comes down to is that this has a story, a detailed world, and puzzles that are all separately extremely solid and spit-shine polished. What I’m not sure is if they’re all working to fully complement each other as a whole. I like the potential story about the prince who is easy to like (but the puzzles I’ve seen don’t have much to do with the prince). I like the world descriptions (but they don’t aren’t necessarily contributing to the story or part of the puzzles). Because all the parts are good, the game is also still pretty good! Polish actually counts for a lot; the effort and love that’s gone into this shows.This is also extremely, thoughtfully implemented, and caught most every action I tried; I doubt this is ever going to have a guess-the-verb problem later on. The amount of unique things the prince does is incredible. It’s a fun world to be in, and it makes you feel the scale of it’s expansive and detailed world.
transcripts:
pq.log.txt (226.1 KB)
pq2.log.txt (86.0 KB)
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Thanks for reviewing Prince Quisborne!
Sorry that you felt stressed by the days and nights… there’s not really any time deadline in play, and we’re told that being out for at least a year is practically expected.
You almost had finished covering the “countryside” that PQ nudged you to explore! Ironically, three of the last areas you didn’t see were ones that contained other characters to interact with and spice things up a bit.
I know that I could have made this game with fewer words, but per your observations, the worldbuilding was, for me, an end in itself. Of course I hope it serves the story and the puzzles as needed, but I hoped it would be a place that could be charming and interesting to explore for its own sake. But I think you’re right that the game is, perhaps more than ordinarily, characterized by a story, a puzzle set, and a worldbuilding that each offer to be an end in themselves.
This comp’s been a little hard for me (oh I know, I asked for it), knowing that most reviews and perceptions of the game are based on such a small percentage of it, and arguably a percentage that doesn’t have the best parts of the story or the adventure or puzzles or humor or whatever else. I know that the over-simplified prologue followed by the potentially bewildering dump into the post-Festival exploration is probably going to create some dubious impressions if folks don’t know where things are heading! Alas… IFComp is the “big” IF competition so I chose it.
Thanks again for playing!
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It’s not so much any worry about time running out so much as… if I’m thinking about this world as one where time DOES pass, then I feel slightly more reluctant to do things that obviously take a lot of time without reason. I don’t care about moving back and forth in small rooms in Zork. I feel slightly more resistant to aimlessly wander here. Because moving between villages would take time and effort. I guess this is slightly about role-playing the character within the reality of the world you’ve created. I’d get over it while playing, don’t worry, it’s more an idle thought about what introducing time and large scale maps does to the game environment.
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Quicker reviews here, more an acknowledgement that I played them.
I have two more things left to review after this. Spoiler alert, they’re One Knight Stand and Please Sign Here.
Assembly
A puzzle parser game based around… IKEA. What a concept!
Great fun, really good length for IFComp, with good story surprises and some very well designed puzzles. Good iteration on the basic mechanic of assembling IKEA furniture. Yes you read that right.
The disambiguation wizardry this must have used!
Also in further innovation following The Vambrace of Destiny’s INVESTIGRAB, whenever you pick up an object here it also automatically gets EXAMINED so you get the description as well. That’s what I always do anyways, so great! Just look at the time I saved!
You might think just following and typing in a set of instructions (“ATTACH side panels to base”) might get monotonous, but it really didn’t. The whole screwdriver sequence (realizing what I needed, the recognition of where it was, the further recognition of how to get there, the brief additional obstacle(wrong lamp), the final solving) was fantastic. The whole showroom maze section? Fantastic.
I did get stuck a while in the cafeteria; I didn’t realize that it was the same wardrobe between both locations, I thought it was two separate ones, and I didn’t see that the top panel had been removed from the cafeteria side after I’d removed in in the closet and went back through. So I did look at the hints for that.
transcript: assembly.txt (149.2 KB)
The Finder’s Commission
Played it, neat little heist game. It does actually extremely remind me of the type of puzzles I’d expect to see in a parser game, just implemented in Twine: finding codes, finding disguises, etc etc. But they were enjoyable to work through.
Very no-nonsense start (oh, I’m a finder, here’s a client, here’s the job? Okay let’s go I guess!). You get to choose your character, I chose the first one (Aspen?). Apparently talking cats are an unremarkable occurrence in the world of Finders, as your client is a cat. And also possibly an ancient Egyptian god.
The museum space is quite large (I do wonder if there’s a better way to fill the museum so it doesn’t feel quite as mechanical). Look around, find all the various things you can do, I liked that there seemed to be more than one solution to some problems. My first attempt, I got 30/100 (something like that) and got caught. After turning off the alarm and putting on gloves first (I had all the stuff I needed, just didn’t use it at the right time) I got 97/100. I did wish I could go out the back door but not sure exactly how I could’ve done it; in my end sequence, the detective was always N so I was always forced W or S for a few turns until I either escaped or got caught. I wanted to meet the tour guide!
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Thank you for the kind review!
I didn’t realize how gnarly this was going to be until my first round of playtesting… quite happy to hear it worked out well in the release. (Probably my favourite little trick is that the game tracks the instruction booklet you most recently read or used, and uses it to help figure out which part you might be trying to attach or detach.)
Credit for this idea goes to Anchorhead, actually! I’ve always been surprised that more games don’t do it… nice for the player, and for me-the-author it was handy to know that the player’s taken at least a cursory look at the stuff they’re carrying around.
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I’m surprised in hindsight the idea never occurred to me. I should add that to things.
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I put this in details, since this may be getting off-topic for the review thread. But I don’t know where else to put it. TLDR: suggested features, plus, an up and coming author could make an extension of this (Unless Daniel’s “add that to things” encompasses that… in which case, ignore the below.)
examining post-take
It seems like there could be several levels of this. For instance, for a to-do list, you might not want to dump everything on the player at once.
So maybe you could have “after examining a examine-when-taken thing” … and of course you the author might want the option not to have the player re-examine something they already examined. Or they player might even want to turn this option off.
You both probably thought of parts of this already–but I think it would make a neat extension, for someone who wanted to contribute to the I7 repo and just make an impact but wasn’t really deep into the guts of I7.
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The sequence X THING, TAKE THING is so deep in my muscle memory by now that having the game describe the thing when I take it would be redundant. In a normal parser game I would probably turn it off, if only for my fear of picking up a poisoned coin and dying.
For straightforward text-adventures, that is. Authors can and will and do come up with all kinds of brilliant settings and circumstances where combining the two commands fits perfectly.
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I sure hope you were not thinking of doing the reverse… make examine pick up things…
>x saw
The circular saw is spinning madly.
As you attempt to grab the saw, your fingers are cleanly sawn off.
I can see the benefit of making a GET automatically do an EXAMINE. But still allow for a separate EXAMINE to take care of the poisoned/sharp/etc thingie scenario. Was that not what they had originally in mind? Ensuring anything in inventory has been examined? Might even go as far as not automatically examining something already examined.
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Yep! This is exactly how it works in both Anchorhead and Assembly… examining only unexamined things when taking them. And you don’t automatically take the things you examine or anything like that.
(One exception… in Assembly you do automatically pick up booklets when examining them. But I think of that as a special case and not a generally good idea.)
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This reminds me of a moment in Stuff of Legend. I remember OPENing a chest, I’m told there’s a baseball inside (or something, I don’t remember the object) but then the game AUTOMATICALLY picked up the baseball for me! Wait, that’s my job! I wanted to pick up the shiny, obviously takeable object myself!
On the other hand, I think after I search a container and that find something, some games automatically pick up the object for me with the SEARCH and some don’t, and I sometimes feel confused if I don’t have the object afterwards. Is that contradictory? Hmm… I think my brain sometimes interprets a “you find a object” statement as also picking it up.
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Why were booklets a special case?
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