Monkeys and Car Keys
I do always admire a well designed parser puzzle! It’s a skill I have a harder time wrapping my head around than some of the other IF related skills like prose writing or storytelling.
This one’s a focused parser puzzler, Inform 6. Just a handful of locations. I’d say medium difficulty? Not a breeze, but not overly difficult. There did seem to be hints if needed, but I never looked at them. Only a few major puzzles, not too long.
You find yourself stranded in the jungle. You have a jeep, but monkeys have stolen your car keys. What a bother. Get them back!
After that intro, I thought just from the premise that this might be a game where, say, I would gradually find things the monkeys had pilfered from my car, and then I’d use those things to solve more puzzles, all while moving deeper into the jungle until I reached, like, the king of monkeys or something. Instead of that more conventional approach of a bunch of small inventory-based puzzles, this instead introduces two major sort of puzzle-centric sections to solve, both pretty interesting and different.
A comparison to Monkey Island might come to mind with how monkey-centric this ends up being, but besides the monkeys, there’s also some of that Monkey Island style of more cartoony, silly-but-consistent logic baked in here. There’s also a bunch of funny descriptions of visual gags, and I could almost imagine how they might be animated in a 90s LucasArts graphic adventure as well. And yeah, the monkeys are very much in the vein of Monkey Island ones, in that some have different behaviours, and you need to learn how they behave in the context of how they serve the puzzles. There is no greater purpose that anything in this game serves other than to be bent to the will of the puzzle gods. Why are some of the things you find in the jungle even out there? Why does this certain monkey act a certain way? They act that way because Puzzle, Puzzle reigns supreme. Although maybe above that, why are some puzzles the way they are? Because there’s a pun involved, of course!
The first area puzzle is great, and figuring out what the statues there do is fun, a nice contained area to experiment with things in. Though that area was shaped like a diamond with ne/nw/se/sw directions which my mind can never really internalize, so I would’ve personally preferred cardinal directions instead. Second major area puzzle’s good also, with an absurd premise. The last section sort of feels like for a large chunk of players, it’d require some UNDOing or a reload if they stumble into the ending sequence without getting an item first; I didn’t have the item, at least, so I had to UNDO a bit. Curious how common that was. UNDOing a couple times wasn’t hard, but don’t think I had any clue what was going to happen. Seemingly needing to hit a monkey with a tire iron was also unexpected, but I did it–but getting to the top of the mound felt like it was set up to be really important. Your whole starting area is built around it literally, lots of seeming noise and movement up there, you try to climb up it and get an item, and then you finally find out what’s up there, and it’s a tire iron, and I fight a monkey with it? Seemed random.
This seems to be focused on presenting a few fun, involving puzzles, and it succeeds. Keeping it in mind for best puzzle type awards for the year (the statues specifically!).