A winter morning on the beach
Wha? There’s a chance I missed something with this. It’s short, if you want to try it out. Parser game, puzzleless. The experience I got was a bit perplexing. The entry DOES list “experimental” as its genre…
It starts off on the beach. You have a daily goal of 10000 steps that your doctor set out for you. There’s an explicit steps counter.
It’s a parser game, but some of the description text is clickable, so if you click on “sand,” it’ll bring up a couple of verbs you can use on it. I thought this might be like a meditative nature walk type of experience at first, something like Ocean Beach or The Fire Tower. But… there’s not a lot to look at, and the descriptions seem quite unromantic about your surroundings. I tried only interacting through the clickable text at first, which leads to some odd interactions like tasting the sand, which you’re then rebuked for trying. If you stay in one place for too many turns, you get pooped on by seagull and you have to go home and change, game over. Restart? I spent some time just clicking on text and getting game overs, before eventually trying to type some commands. Turns out the clickable text doesn’t encompass all the commands you can do.
But the stoic descriptions, the lack of any other people around… and then the only world-building I could see being that the beach was split off into a bunch of numbered zones, and every time you restart you’d begin in a different zone? I was thinking maybe it was maybe going to be a Rematch-lite type of looping meta-puzzle at this point, and that some sort of dystopian twist that was coming. Didn’t ultimately encounter that though.
I just keep moving along the beach, and a bunch of mildly monotonous turns later, I reach my step goal. There’s a small interaction. I get a “What a wonderful day!” ending. I feel like this is giving me a couple different tones that I’m unable to tie together.
So assuming restarts didn’t matter, all I did was WALK repeatedly. Took breaths when it reminded me to. Looked at some signs. Occasionally stopped to see if anything had changed. Once I got my steps, I was on a walkway. Found a toy car. Entered a building. Gave the car to a crying child. Got some good news about a grandchild. End.