Hello!
Haven’t been on this forum in a bit, just got busy with life stuff at the end of last year. Normally I wouldn’t bother mentioning this, but there were a couple threads and reviews that I said I’d write but that I didn’t get around to. So I could and should finish those. But then I also see it’s ParserComp season heading into IFComp, and there’s also something called a Review-a-thon?
Well for now, I’ll get back into it with some ParserComp reviews!
The English Restaurant
“Practice your English in a restaurant!” the blurb says. I thought maybe there’d be some twist on this–I’m not sure exactly why I thought that–but this is exactly what it says on the tin. You’re presented a brief scenario: you’re at a restaurant, go and order a meal for you and your son, and then you’re just engaged in back-and-forth dialogue with the various staff. It’s built in a natural language engine, and explicitly wants the player to communicate directly with the other characters in full conversational sentences, instead of trying to communicate commands to the parser.
It really did seem to work decently well at the start! “I’d like a table for two, please” gave back a good response. It felt promising. But eventually I did start to hit some snags when trying to order for my son. “Are there any vegetarian options?” was met with a blunt “yes” by the waiter and nothing else, which is funny because it’s an entirely “correct” response, but also the exact sort of thing you’d expect from a robot in a sci-fi novel that interprets questions literally but can’t infer what you’re actually trying to ask. And whenever I tried to ask for multiple things, it seems to just split them as two separate queries and then give me back two responses one after the other (but I can see why trying to combine those answers could get dicey). I started hitting more words it couldn’t understand, and then it gave me a response that slightly misunderstood what I was actually asking. But I did eventually did get the both of us fed, and paid for. It got there in the end.
Natural language processing projects are cool! I haven’t played around ChatGPT or any of the newer paid AI chatbots, but I’ve briefly poked at the older free chatbots before. I’ve also played Facade. This doesn’t close to the responsiveness of any of those, but this does seem to be a smaller project than those, so I imagine those are quite high bars to reach. The bot is much more candid than Facade was: In Facade, you’d get a lot of awkward silences and the other characters would try to brush past anything if the engine didn’t understand a word. Here, the parser just butts in and transparently says “I don’t know the words: My.” So is this approach better, or is just ignoring all the words it doesn’t know, like Facade seems to try to do, better?
Regarding its stated purpose, can you practice English with this? No, it’s not robust enough for that yet. Parts of this does work, but not quite enough for this to fully carry out a conversation.
?:hello
(Note: This game is designed to practice English: type in actual sentences you’d say in real life. If you get stuck, ask yourself what you would really say in the real world and type that.)
You’re going to a restaurant with your son, Johnny, who is vegetarian and too scared to order by himself. Get a table and buy lunch for both of you. You have 20 dollars in cash.
Host: Hello! How can I help you today?
?:I’d like a table for two, please.
Host: Perfect! Please come right this way. The host shows you to a wooden table with a checkered tablecloth. A minute goes by, then your waiter arrives.
Waiter: Hi there!
Waiter: What can I get you?
?:Menus, and two hot waters.
Waiter: Oh, I forgot to give you the menu! I’ll get you one right away.
Host: Sorry, I don’t know how to give you that.
Waiter: Can I get you anything besides a menu for you?
?:Two waters to drink
I don’t know the words: to
Waiter: Can I get you anything besides a menu for you?
?:water
Waiter: water is an excellent choice!
Waiter: Can I get you anything besides a menu and a water for you?
?:no
Waiter: I’ll be right back!
A few minutes go by and the waiter returns.
Waiter: Here is a menu and water for you.
The menu says:
Steak – $10
Roasted Chicken – $7
Grilled Salmon – $12
Waiter: What can I get you?
?:My son Jimmy is vegetarian. Are there any options for him to eat?
I don’t know the words: My
I don’t know the words: eat
Waiter: What can I get you?
?:Are there any vegetarian options?
Yes.
Waiter: What can I get you?
?:Do you have salad?
Son: Wait, let’s not order salad before we know how much it costs.
Waiter: What can I get you?
?:salad?
Son: Wait, let’s not order salad before we know how much it costs.
Waiter: What can I get you?
?:how much would a salad cost
I don’t know the words: how, how
Waiter: What can I get you?
?:are there vegetarian options
Yes.
Waiter: What can I get you?
?:is there a vegetarian menu
Yes.
Waiter: What can I get you?
?:what vegetarian options can you offer
I don’t know the words: offer
Waiter: What can I get you?
?:what vegetarian options can you cook
I don’t know the words: cook
Waiter: What can I get you?
?:vegetarian
I don’t know the way you used: vegetarian
Waiter: What can I get you?
?:Is there another menu
I don’t know the words: another
Waiter: What can I get you?
?:can i see the menu again
Host: Sorry, I don’t know how to give you that.
Waiter: What can I get you?
?:menu
Waiter: Oh, I already gave you a menu. You can see that there is a menu in front of you.
The menu says:
Steak – $10
Roasted Chicken – $7
Grilled Salmon – $12
Waiter: What can I get you?
?:is there salad
Yes.
Waiter: What can I get you?
?:how much is a salad
3 dollars
Waiter: What can I get you?
?:can I order a salad and a grilled salmon
I don’t understand the way you are using: order
Waiter: What can I get you?
?:salad and grilled salmon
Waiter: salad is an excellent choice!
Waiter: salmon is an excellent choice!
Waiter: Can I get you anything besides a salad and a salmon for you?
?:no
Waiter: I’ll be right back!
A few minutes go by and the waiter returns.
Waiter: Here is a salad and salmon for you.
The food is good, but nothing extraordinary.
Waiter: What can I get you?
?:bill
Waiter: Your total is 15 dollars.
Waiter: So, do you want to pay with cash or card?
?:card
You reach into your pocket and realize you don’t have a credit card.
Waiter: So, do you want to pay with cash or card?
?:cash
Waiter: Ah. Perfect! Have a great rest of your day.
You and Johnny go back to the front of the restaurant and prepare for your next adventure!
?:hello
(Note: This game is designed to practice English: type in actual sentences you’d say in real life. If you get stuck, ask yourself what you would really say in the real world and type that.)
You’re going to a restaurant with your son, Johnny, who is vegetarian and too scared to order by himself. Get a table and buy lunch for both of you. You have 20 dollars in cash.
Host: Hello! How can I help you today?
?:table for two, please
Host: Perfect! Please come right this way. The host shows you to a wooden table with a checkered tablecloth. A minute goes by, then your waiter arrives.
Waiter: Hi there!
Waiter: What can I get you?
?:could i get a menu
Waiter: Oh, I forgot to give you the menu! I’ll get you one right away.
Waiter: Can I get you anything besides a menu for you?
?:two glasses of water, please
Waiter: water is an excellent choice!
Waiter: Can I get you anything besides a menu and a water for you?
?:no
Waiter: I’ll be right back!
A few minutes go by and the waiter returns.
Waiter: Here is a menu and water for you.
The menu says:
Steak – $10
Roasted Chicken – $7
Grilled Salmon – $12
Waiter: What can I get you?
?:are there any vegetarian options?
Yes.
Waiter: What can I get you?
?:what are the vegetarian options?
Waiter: Ah, I forgot to tell you about our specials. Today we have tomato soup, green salad, and smoked pork.
Waiter: What can I get you?
?:what are the prices for the specials?
I don’t know the words: prices
Waiter: What can I get you?
?:how much are the specials?
4 dollars
3 dollars
8 dollars
Waiter: What can I get you?
?:could I get a steak for me, and a soup and salad for my son?
That was too complicated for me to understand …
Waiter: What can I get you?
?:could I get a steak, a soup, and a salad?
Could you try a different wording? That will take me a while to think through.
?:could I get a steak
Son: Wait, we already spent $18 so if we get 1 steak, we won’t be able to pay for it with $20.
Waiter: Can I get you anything besides a steak and 2 soups for you?
?:can i cancel a soup
Waiter: I have removed a soup from the order for you.
Waiter: Can I get you anything besides a steak and a soup for you?
?:can i order a salad
I don’t understand the way you are using: order
Waiter: Can I get you anything besides a steak and a soup for you?
?:can i have a salad too
Waiter: salad is an excellent choice!
Waiter: Can I get you anything besides a steak, a soup, and a salad for you?
?:no
Waiter: I’ll be right back!
A few minutes go by and the waiter returns.
Waiter: Here is a steak, soup, and salad for you.
The food is good, but nothing extraordinary.
Waiter: What can I get you?
?:nothing
Waiter: I’ll be right back!
A few minutes go by and the waiter returns.
Waiter: What can I get you?
?:nothing
Waiter: I’ll be right back!
A few minutes go by and the waiter returns.
Waiter: What can I get you?
?:check, please
Waiter: Your total is 17 dollars.
Waiter: So, do you want to pay with cash or card?
?:cash
Waiter: Ah. Perfect! Have a great rest of your day.
You and Johnny go back to the front of the restaurant and prepare for your next adventure!
There you see the friendly host …
Project Postmortem
Very brief game, involving a single straightforward puzzle. Your college professor has just died, and you get a phone call from another professor asking you to go and try to find a certain seemingly vital piece of research on the dead professor’s computer located in the Engineering Annex. You apparently feel apprehensive about this task, the general tone of the intro makes clear! But exactly why you feel that way is left vague at the start.
You get a bit more insight into what’s going on by the end, but you’re probably not playing this for its super in-depth story. What you do get is a short, fairly trivial ten-minute puzzle. But it’s the sort of puzzle that would make a decent filler puzzle in a longer game.
And even though it’s really easy to solve, the puzzle really did lead to a decent chain of player insight. Here’s how it went for me: an obstacle was presented → you wander around and you find a few things → something doesn’t work as you expect → you find out why it doesn’t work → you find out something else you can do → you realize that if you do these certain things, that will help solve your initial obstacle. Just enough of a logical step needed for it to be pleasing. There’s basically nothing you can do in the game other than the things that solve the puzzle, so it’s pretty trivial as it stands, but obfuscate it a little bit more I think, and add a few more red herring things you can do or look at (a few more messages on the computer, a few more settings or things you can do on the computer so you have to pick out exactly what you really want to do) and suddenly it’s a solid little puzzle!
This uses an engine called Gamefic, which at a glance seems like a parser platform catering more towards online play. It does include save/load/undo/restart buttons, which I never tried. The engine worked smoothly, no problems. The biggest common inconveniences of custom parsers always feel like two things: this DOES have standard parser shortcuts (x, l, i, nwse), and follows general conventional commands. This doesn’t however understand “it” in a command like SEARCH IT, though that one’s understandable enough since I imagine that would take a huge amount of work to implement.
(Warning: super nit-pickiness ahead!) So this passage:
The lobby
The Engineering Annex is a supplement to the School of Engineering’s main building, mostly used as an archival library and an informal study space for graduate students. Your footsteps resound on the marble floor.
“Your footsteps resound on the marble floor” within a location description sort of implies to me that that’s a constant description of that place, right? This description doesn’t change even if I try to LOOK again. So I’m imagining my character just constantly pacing around while I’m in there, causing the echoing footsteps to never go away. It’s just a funny little image I have in my head.
Iyashikei – The Fountain
Described as a “tranquil and soothing interactive fiction game that transports players into a serene, meditative experience,” this is more of a puzzleless parser entry, the closest thing I can think of being The Fire Tower, which was entered into the 2004 IF Art Show and self-described as a “virtual summer hike.”
I did find it a bit relaxing just making my way through this, so it does its job well! Just a handful of locations on an island to explore.
This does have a bit of a telling, not showing, issue, in which it kept unnecessarily (IMO) explicitly telling me about what a tranquil and lush and meditative journey and environment I was on and in, instead of leaving that job to the text descriptions of all the surrounding sights and sounds. Also did lean on adjectives quite a bit, and repeatedly the same ones too (lush, tranquil, serene calming etc). The imagery and descriptions that are here seemed fine enough that those could’ve carried the tone implicitly by themselves, instead of the descriptions being quite as insistent as they are.
Also some missing room exits at one point. I also found these responses a bit funny/incongruous with the zen tones used in all the rest of Iyashikei:
> swim
You must be joking.> dance
Dancing is forbidden.
“Dancing is forbidden” seems so foreboding, somehow!
If I’m thinking about how to develop this sort of thing further, I wonder if more of a focus for the player would help this sort of experience. It doesn’t need to be “larger” per se, but would it break the vibe, be too goal-oriented if there was more of a “thing” you were doing in something like this? Or maybe just a more coherent journey, because the locations didn’t feel like a singular connected locale you were going through, so much as a couple of different “relaxing” locations you were flipping between. It didn’t really feel like a journey. Maybe if the hike through the woods felt longer, or there was just more of a sense of exploration, either between locations or within them? The bottle was the most intriguing detail here, so maybe more stuff like that or more of a through-line throughout the experience with something like that could be cool.
But anyways, it provided a nice little break in time. It also seems like a good avenue to explore; a focus not on puzzles, or narrative, but on mood. Oh, one more comparable I thought of: Ocean Beach was also an attempt at something more meditative, a slow walk down a beach.
The Samurai and the Kappa
So this is a more medium-sized puzzle parser game. Set in… uh, I was going to reflexively write “feudal Japan” but you know what, my knowledge of japanese historical periods isn’t good enough for me to know if that’s correct. Let’s see… this game’s blurb indicates that this is “early Edo period.”
You’re a samurai, travelling around. You stop at an inn for a night (this serves as a sort of tutorial) and the next day you learn about a fearsome monster called a kappa that is kidnapping children from a nearby village. You feel duty bound to help, of course.
This is a really solid, polished game with a nice grounding in Japanese history and mythology, with two major, fun logic-type puzzles to solve that aren’t too difficult. You’ll want to break out a pen and paper to solve them. I had a good time with this! If you play this, I’d recommend reading the itch.io game page’s instructions as well, and not just the in-game HELP.
The game’s itch.io page indicates that this was initially written for the Text Adventure Literacy Jam, so there’s a fairly thorough for-beginners tutorial at the start. You can also turn off the tutorial guide text. Worthwhile endeavor, though it means the start of the game is fairly mundane for the semi-experienced player because you’re just… checking in and then going through a night routine, as the game teaches you actions like how to handle your inventory. You do learn a lot of japanese history and terminology during this, which I’m going to assume is all historically accurate. That was nice! A lot of research must’ve gone into this.
After all the explicit actions at the inn to get to sleep though, I was surprised when the next day, I was told that my character had woken up at night to investigate a noise but couldn’t find anything and had gone back to sleep. That noise in the night was the most exciting thing that had happened so far in the game to the player, and it’s just told to you after the fact, without any player involvement. (In fact, the nighttime noise is probably the most “exciting” event in the whole game, insofar as it’s the only moment in the story where you don’t know exactly what’s going on). Slight disappointment with that after the slow start already. I got over it pretty quickly of course–after getting up, you’re told about the kappa terrorizing the nearby village which is what made all that ruckus the night before, then led straight to the village where the brunt of the game will begin, so the player quickly gets caught up.
The other thing the intro made me think about was about parser vocabulary. Your inventory is full of things like waraji, kamishimo, and tachi. That’s great in teaching some new words and also perhaps creating a stronger sense of setting. But it can be hard to spell out kamishimo in a parser command since it’s a long, unfamiliar word. My reflexive approach to this might be to just refer to say, the waraji as sandals in any descriptions, and then if the player actually examines them then the player would learn that they’re also called waraji. But maybe that’s not a good approach for other reasons. Maybe that’s overly anglifying everything? This way is certainly more memorable, for one thing!
The two puzzles: so you reach the village, and fairly quickly encounter the two main puzzles. We’ve always had these discussions about what makes a good parser puzzle, and one of the things often brought up is if it naturally fits the story/environment. Both here are logic puzzles (of the type you might find in a puzzle book) implemented in the parser. The first one involves laying tiles on a grid. It’s fun! It’s also justified fully within the narrative; the tiles and grid represent specific things, and a character isn’t just like “solve this tower of hanoi and I’ll give you a key!” Without explaining the whole puzzle setup, what you’re doing is figuring out where, within a five by five grid of locations you can move around in, you want to drop down a set of tiles you have, to satisfy certain requirements. I did feel like if there was a way for me to see, in real-time, an overview of where I’d put down tiles, the puzzle would feel even better integrated into the parser itself (there’s a carving of what the grid looks like from a top-down view on a nearby pillar. If I could have basically that carving, but one that I could carry around with me that would show me where and dropped tiles were, that would have helped, sort of like how Lock and Key showed a top-down view of its dungeon that made playing that easier. But certainly adding that might be a lot more work). I basically stared at the ASCII carving for a while, went and placed down tiles, was a bit uncertain about the last 3 tiles I had, went back to the carving to see if it had updated, found out it hadn’t, and then opened Excel and made my own little grid to figure out the placement of the last 3 tiles of the puzzle. Satisfying!
The other puzzle is a logic puzzle that I’ve seen before, involving lining up a lot of information and some deductive reasoning. Importantly, it’s also quite fun, so it’s fully justified on that front. But this one is slightly less well integrated. It involves farmers in the village, which makes sense for the setting, and the end goal (figure out what a certain person’s favorite drink is, and they’ll give you a certain piece of information you need) is fine. But the information each farmer has within the puzzle doesn’t make total sense (why would a farmer know the favorite drink of “the farmer that lives in the north side of the village” but not their actual name?), and so it sort of just becomes… here’s a logic puzzle, go and walk around and gather all the pieces, then bring up your notes and solve it on the side while the parser idly waits for your answer. That tile puzzle was also close to solvable for me just in my head, but this farmer one definitely wasn’t. Used Notepad++ for notes, then Excel to visualize it. The question is, should a good parser puzzle try to only stay within the parser? But I’ve had no problem breaking out pen and paper for something like Enter the Facility and I’ve definitely enjoyed taking notes in detective games before, so maybe that’s not really an issue! But also then, this is a puzzle that doesn’t mechanically feel like it fits in the parser realm either; like the tile puzzle works with parser interactions quite well, just me moving around and dropping and picking up tiles. Here, the parser part of this is I’m moving around finding people, then I ask the same three questions of everyone, and that all felt less necessary. After all, I’ve seen this type of logic puzzle before, but with all the info already written out so I didn’t have to go collect it. So the extra steps here just felt like… extra steps.
I did get stuck for a while not knowing what to do after solving that farmer puzzle (where would I get that drink?). And what emerges from me trying to figure that out is, I couldn’t really engage with the villagers in topics outside of the specific slice of the puzzle or quest they’re supposed to give to the player. I’ve played many great games before where the characters are sort of like that, of course, and it’s not a huge deal. The villagers here are actually decently written, actually, with distinctive personalities even. But I think the specific thing here is, my real-world logic approach to “where do I find this person’s favorite drink” (once I knew what it was), would be to just ASK that person where they’d normally get it. And I couldn’t do that! That’s what I intuitively wanted to do, and no one else in the village could be asked about this either. If you put me in a town with a bunch of friendly locals and you ask me to find something, I just might try asking around for it. I did quite like the eventual solution to how to get the drink (I think I spent the most time thinking it was in someone’s hut, just because the huts kept saying something about you only being able to enter if you were invited, so I thought I needed to find the person who had the drink in their hut, but no). Also part of me getting stuck there was just that I played this one across multiple days, and my brain just thought the inn was south of the long east/west path and not north, so I kept trying to go south and it told me I didn’t want to return there, so I crossed that whole earlier part of the map off. In my mind, I tend to slightly associate NORTH with “forward” game progress by default. That part is more on me the player.
Overall: had fun with the puzzles, great setting, would recommend! I especially appreciate the amount of thought that’s gone into building a game around all these culture specific elements.
Thanks for the review. You picked up on the good points and the not-so-good. I knew I was taking a big risk with this game, as it attempted a few things that have never been tried before. The logic puzzle was one of those. I might write a post-mortem when the comp is over.
There’s one thing you must have missed. You can get a map of the courtyard and the location of the tiles using X COURTYARD. This was a last-minute addition, so I may not have hinted at it very well, if at all. Sorry about that.
Thanks for your making the game! Don’t think I reviewed it, but also enjoyed Alchemist’s Gold.
And I always like to read through postmortems of games I’ve played (it’s also a good process for authors to reflect, I think!)
19 Once
Small parser game based around a conversation-based puzzle.
You’re 19, trying to convince your four best friends back from your school days to see a movie together with you. You’ve all slightly drifted apart since graduating from secondary school, as you all enter separate worlds of university/work/etc. But this movie is a chance for all of you to reunite. You’re in front of your laptop, trying to persuade them all via virtual chat.
What that involves in practice is a dialogue puzzle. You chat with each of them, and you… you “unlock” new topics of conversation that you can then go and ask each of them about (ugh I didn’t want to use “unlock” to describe the system because it sounds so game-y, but then it’s ultimately a game-y sort of system; you’re not learning new information about the topic necessarily, you’re just only able to ask about “friendship” after someone else brings it up). The game is basically about talking to each of them, learning about their lives, figuring out what their hang-up about going to the movie is, and then figuring out how to convince them to go.
The only commands are to move between chatrooms (you talk to each of them one-on-one, no group chats), and the conversation topics. Each friend–fortuitously–also happens to have a name that starts with a letter corresponding to our traditional parser compass direction commands: Sofia, Nora, Esther, and Wesley.
I really liked the puzzle here! It’s a puzzle that felt engaging, because of how it really involves the social dynamics of the friend group. Each of your friends has enough personality to seem well-rounded and distinctive. Esther (the first person I uh, “solved,” aka convinced to go) was maybe too easily persuaded by me, so I didn’t really learn that much about her. But the other three characters were all interesting. I also didn’t really understand what exactly I did to convince Wesley; narratively, Wesley hardly seemed to be putting up much of a fight against going (he’d just rather stay home instead and watch–I don’t actually know what he wants to watch, something called “vidcons” which I’d assumed were like, japanese anime related or something like that. But googling only brings up a convention.), so it didn’t seem like it would take much to tip him over. So on that front, not knowing exactly how I convinced him was fine. But my puzzle brain wanted a concrete, specific topic that would convince him, in the same way it did for Esther before, but for him, but I didn’t quite know why the topic that pushed him over ended up being the solve. Still, this is brief enough and the characters are engaging enough that it was easy to get past these things.
What comes to mind for this sort of conversation-focused parser game is Weird City Interloper, which was well regarded and considered pretty innovative when it was released in 2014, and also primarily a focused, limited parser game about talking to people, unlocking topics and then going back to people and asking about the new topics. Also there was a comp game before… I’m looking it up… House from Spring Thing 2018, a one room TADS conversation game, mostly about a husband and wife talking to each other about their troubled (I think?) relationship. That one had the conventional ASK/TELL system, but had abbreviated shortcuts so ASK WIFE ABOUT MONEY became A MONEY. That one was slightly more dramatic, and also a bigger game than this. Then there’s Galatea and many others. But what all these conversation-based games can do is focus more on things like characterization and relationships. I’m interested in seeing more stuff like this, conversations more as puzzles or with some sort of end goal, more than just conversations that always flow forward and act more as characterization flavouring.
Zugzwang
Short little battle puzzle game. There are four different bosses, and you have to discover attacks and then use them to attack their weaknesses. With a general sort of chess metaphor surrounding the whole thing (you’re a pawn, you fight a rook/bishop/king/knight). Lots of fun visceral descriptions of the battle sequences.
At the end of 19 Once, there was a bolded keyword, just like all the other keywords that came before. It was “watch party” so I typed it in and got this:
> watch party
(I’d love to have a DVD watch party for Zugzwang when it’s out, but right now I need to convince everyone to see it at the cinema with me.)
But wait, I remembered Zugzwang was the name of another ParserComp entry. so I played this afterwards. The structure is the same: four rooms, learn commands, use the commands to learn more commands, eventually win over all of them with the right command. I did also type in watch party in Zugzwang at the start, and that was neat but I’ll talk about that slightly later. But it looks like this pair of entries are connected.
The puzzle structure is the exact same; the only difference is the aesthetic over top. But the aesthetic, it turns out, matters quite a bit, because 19 Once was charming, and Zugzwang wasn’t quite as interesting. Possibly, if I played them in reverse order, it would be different? But you replace some friends and the whole social element with just these generic enemy archetypes, and it was harder for me to care about what was going on. Even though your friends are also archetypes, of a different sort. But I just didn’t feel as invested.
I do actually admire the writing for Zugzwang, because there’s some pretty darn awesome action sequence play-by-play here, and those seemed trickier to write well than the chat dialogue in 19 Once. Though 19 Once involves a different type of writing I suppose, because planning out each of those character’s backgrounds seems more involved than sketching out each of the enemies in Zugzwang.
Also the use of the attacks felt unbalanced across the four enemies (some attacks didn’t really come into play, some attacks were used multiple times) and something in my mind just really wanted it to feel more evenly distributed between where the attacks were used.
The DVD commentary (I typed in watch party here too, at the start) was fun; apparently Esther is a huge book vs movie debater as that’s where most of her dialogue was concentrated so that’s something more I learned about her, and all the other characters were about as expected. I do feel like there was opportunity here to make this whole running commentary part really continue the story of the four friends along, which it didn’t really, but still quite amusing.
I think you’re absolutely right. I mean to write something about this when the competition is over, but the actual text matters not just for the enjoyment of the story/writing/characters but for the understanding of any puzzles. The Rock and Wesley are mechanically identical, but wearing down the Rock makes more narrative sense. Conversely, Fortify and Memes are equally useless, but the latter can give more varied and characterful responses when tried on the four targets.
The two games are mirrored exactly, so I wonder if you saw the second cross-game command?
If you mean give up, I did see it as well.
Results are out, congrats to all the authors! Especially to high placers and also anyone entering a comp for the first time. Also thanks to the organizer!
The reviews meanwhile continue on, just a few more left.
Race Against Time
It’s the future! There’s an International Space Laboratory out in space, where scientists from all over the world fly out to do research. Unfortunately there was a virus outbreak, everyone died, and they’re afraid it’ll spread back to Earth. Your job is to go on board and activate the station’s self-destruct sequence. And hopefully not die in the process.
ADRIFT game, puzzly, though not super elaborate ones. Not short exactly, but I’d call this maybe medium length? I downloaded any played the Windows executable, and as I recalled from the instructions for ADRIFT comp entries before, I did turn off autocomplete and turned on the auto-map in the menu.
So this is a your fairly classic little explore-the-station type of excursion. Locked doors, (fob) keys to find, codes, replacing broken parts. Everyone on board is dead and you seem pretty unbothered about all the dead bodies, so it’s a fairly sedate atmosphere, really. Lots of SEARCH and LOOK UNDER involved here. I don’t know if it’s correct to say this was “difficult” but I did have to look at hints a few times after I got stuck. The hints, by the way, were quite nice! A graduated hint system.
I don’t necessarily mind a bit of searching on its surface (until of course I inevitably miss something, THEN it becomes a problem). If I encounter some shelves in a parser game, or some storage boxes, hey, great, I’m just looking forward to seeing the SEARCH results. Early on here though, I LOOKed UNDER something fairly innocuous, and found something, and well, that just locked me into SEARCHing and LOOKing UNDER every conceivably applicable thing for the whole rest of my playthrough. Lots of rooms here have a basic desk/chair/bunk bed set, so a lot of combing through those. As a player looking back on the game, I don’t think it loses anything, for me at least, if all the items I’d found through this search process had just been found in slightly more conspicuous places–on top of desks, in drawers, in like a trash can or something, or SEARCHed off of bodies–because I think I’d still have gotten the sense of exploring the spaceship since the items could still be spread out in the same rooms, just not hidden so innocuously and exhaustively. Because going room to room and looking at everything is a fun thing to do (really it is! …Right? Not just me?), it’s just the routine of repeatedly SEARCHing through all the chairs and beds that got tiresome by the end. But hey, maybe it’s just a staple that other people still enjoy?
I also wasn’t minding it all too much, until well, I finally missed searching a thing, and I got stuck on a puzzle: finding the second pin. So… I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out where to find something to straighten that bent pin. Which seemed like it could’ve been a good puzzle, but then I finally looked at the hints that told me that wasn’t it, needed to find something else. Looked some more, then looked at the hints again–Oh, well there’s the thing I missed SEARCHing. I think I got the wrong impression from examining a certain item (papers) because I was told they were “of little interest” which I just took to mean “move on, this doesn’t matter” which I perhaps shouldn’t have, but still… I feel like descriptions probably should somewhat tip the player off on the things worth interacting with further. Doing that means that it might feel more participatory for the player when they choose to search something.
In contrast to that item description, there’s a lot of chairs everywhere, but there’s also this one in the eastern quarters:
> x chair
It’s a simple chair, molded from a single piece of plastic. It doesn’t look too comfortable. The occupant has tried to add a little colour to the chair by covering the seat with a home made cover.> x cover
The cover really does add to the room. The bright colour lighting up the otherwise dull appearance.
I read that, and the cover stands out! It’s uniquely described, and that’s the type of thing that piques my interest and makes me want to examine it further. Hiding something under that cover would’ve felt “fair” to me. But actually the cover didn’t seem to functionally matter. It was just a bit of characterization. I bring this up just to contrast the way the way I (mis)interpreted those two different text descriptions. Or even with the “of little interest” papers, maybe if the player could notice some sort of hidden panel thing on the wall while looking at the wall photos or something else that could tip the player off to take a second look around in the room. Just some more sort of signposting.
Other thing is I didn’t really like the bent pin solution even in retrospect. I mentioned I thought I’d have to straighten the bent pin, so I thought it would be a more interesting puzzle than it ended up being. But I also couldn’t really imagine how the projector worked. It pops up, projects an image onto the wall. Then… there’s suddenly a map pin on the wall? Holding up a picture? Was the map pin there before? Even with the map pin, I don’t look at that description and think it makes sense as a replacement pin, because what I’m trying to unlock is a high security door with seemingly unique, protected keys. Why would a random map pin unlock half of it?? I did also get a bit cranky at the keypad codes after failing the entry one repeatedly, because I always entered a four-digit year instead of a two-digit one; spent way too long on it, got frustrated, read hints, saw the solution and just quit out. I tried the game again a few days later. More venting: why would they ever use dates in the shuttle codes, that wouldn’t even be secure! Do they need to manually update the shuttle keypad every single day? Why would they have separate codes to enter and exit, and why would they differ in that small, meaningless way?? OK, phew, sorry. Out of my system.
One thing I did really like is the general sense of… tactility there is to what you’re doing. Buttons to press, things that need to be pushed and pulled out of the way, grooves and indentations that are described on items and things. Despite being on a space station, you don’t have to actually interact with all that much tech; it all feels quite grounded. But your presence is felt as you make your way through the ship.
So eliminating a bit of the searching, and adding a slight bit more signposting would be my desires for this. Outside of the two places I got really stuck, I had a fine enough time.
I did also feel like the setup plus general genre vibes hinted that there’d be some sort of mystery to uncover (“what actually happened”). I didn’t see that before I left, but then there were one or two things left unused. (the fob reader in the south scientist’s quarters, anyone get into that? The vial, was that just narrative? At the end I just got back onto the ship, automatically left the empty vial, and it said “you have won”
raceagainsttimetranscript.txt (191.2 KB)
Regarding the last (spoilered) paragraph in your review of Race Against Time:
Oh yeah you’re correct, that reader was probably just for the door.
Yurf
Game aimed more at children, so quite whimsical and colorful. The quest: find the four gems, in order to save the world! There’s a slight semi-educational bent to this, as some of the creatures you encounter are obsessed with math, others with words (specifically editing!), others with poetry and music. Certainly, it’s a world filled with creative types of all forms and shapes. UI is colorful, with lots of fanciful fonts and a general splashy look.
Intriguingly, it’s a one-word-command-only game, and the parser won’t even accept invalid commands (does that… does that clash with the whole creativity thing? Hmm. Nah). You can type in invalid words, but you can’t enter them (as in, pressing enter has no effect). This actually works quite well! I didn’t feel any particular sense of under-implementation for commands it didn’t accept. Certainly easier than needing to write a whole bunch of rejection messages. But the game is also quite clear about the types of commands it DOES accept, and a lot of the game involves doing things to add specific commands to your repertoire. And this rejection system might become slightly more annoying if applied to a game with more complex commands; here, you’re only ever backspacing a single word, after all.
I found it enjoyable, even as a non-child! Though I wonder about if some of it’s gonna go over a youngster’s head; I definitely had to look up “orrery”! And the mathegardener certainly name drops some fairly advanced arithmetic topics!
Puzzles were generally quite decent, a couple being of the “find the right command to use” variety, while others were more like riddles basically, so for those, you basically either entered the right answer, or you didn’t. There is a HINT command though implemented. Couple puzzles, did have trouble with: finishing the love song, that solutions seemed arbitrary, and I found the round number answer (the person that hints to you the answer) early on, but I just wasn’t able to re-locate them afterwards. The map has a few harder to encounter cold spots like that; I also didn’t find the editor until a good couple wanders around the map. The artist’s question is an interesting little leap in riddle logic that I had to return to later, but I did get it after a while. Eureka!
It’s mostly just a little world of a lot of different fantastical people to talk to (or well, I guess they’re not all human. Lots of anthropomorphic things). The most a story comes into play is with the king and queen, who have fallen out of love with each other. They’re quite involved in the final puzzle, and an exciting little ending finale sequence. Which was all quite silly and dramatic and amusing.
I enjoyed it!
There’s a new game+ mode as well that promises harder puzzles, which I didn’t try.
Thank you so much for playing my very silly little game, and for your very kind review! I loved making Yurf but I don’t think the one-word parser concept holds a lot of potential. I’ve gone back to reading Russo’s Guybrush’s Heirs on the Rosebush, and have done a lot of thinking about a simplified text game interface.
Though, honestly, the perfect game interface is a hard to problem to solve, and probably doesn’t exist.
Return of the Sword
Is “old school” too broad a term to describe a game? This FEELS pre-90s in a lot of ways, which is mostly what I mean by that. A cheerful “let’s go on an quest!” type of text adventure, with a fun goal (You’re trying to find Excalibur!), with a maze, with a 230 point scoring system (it increments in 10s, so not quite as intimidating as that might appear!), with colorful text that hearkens back to pre-Windows graphic stylings, and loads of puzzles, some exploration, and a sort of kitchen sink approach to its world-building. Certainly a much larger game than anything else I’ve played this ParserComp.
I really enjoyed it! There’s a sort of genial charm to the whole thing. Light on story, a diverse set of not particularly punishing puzzles, but engaging throughout.
And there are efforts to modernize this as well. There’s been a lot of thought put into the thorough HELP text, so the player isn’t just left to fend for themselves; lots of explanations about the types of commands this uses, constraints, and tips too. There’s a good HINT system in-game, and also a downloadable walkthrough if you get stuck. HELP says there’s no unwinnable states, but I did hit one, and had to reload (saving often is probably still good; don’t leave area 2 without adding at least 4 things to your inventory!). Function keys (F1, F2, etc) are all mapped to commonly needed, slightly longer commands (GET ALL FROM IT, PUT COIN IN SLOT) which is a thoughtful inclusion.
The whole thing is written in qBasic64, and you know what, it’s probably one of the most thoroughly implemented custom engine games I can remember playing. No problems, could’ve been an Inform game for all I really noticed, outside of the way you get items from inside containers, but the HELP text is very clear on this idiosyncrasy. Also never did figure out how to really turn BACK the pages in a book; I just closed the book and started from the beginning again whenever I needed a prior page, but I assume there was a better way I missed.
A lot of the likeability is in its world, which has a certain wonder to it. There’s a main chamber you’ll return to often, with a dial that turns 1 to 5, a slot, and a switch. Put a coin into a slot, turn the dial and flip the switch, and you’ll be transported to different areas, and perhaps different eras. I would compare the tone to Myst, but note that’s from someone who never actually played Myst! There’s a cheerful sort of disregard to necessarily trying to explain what’s going on, but the results is I never entered a room knowing what to expect. My inventory included a spellbook, a remote control, potions, a pair of spectacles, and a stepladder. Walk through a mist covered heath, past a door set in a huge boulder, down through a small passage, and emerge in a huge cathedral! This has a large variety of rooms, without necessarily having a large number of them.
The puzzles are similarly wide ranging. Yep, a traditional maze is here (thanks to the Samurai and Kappa for giving me a refresher course on Maze Solving 101!). Keypad codes. passwords. inventory puzzles. One favorite puzzle was in a corridor, where there was this aperture that would close when you got near it but open when you went to the other side of the long corridor. So then how do you get what’s inside? There were some other puzzles which felt a bit obscure, and which I went to HINTS to (the password for the boulder door? I didn’t understand that one). Puzzles generally are not overly tough, but there’s some possibility you might have to look at hints.
The complicating issue with the puzzles is that they take place within all this wide open, haphazard world design; without a more concrete structure, it’s easy to just miss things, because important items are just strewn about everywhere. Is this closed compartment something I should try to open? Oh, the HINTS say that I should just go back to it much later. How do I get past this closed and locked door in the church? Oh, apparently I missed a room in the previous area, so I didn’t get the item I needed back there for this. There are things that you need to solve later, but also just loads of red herring items, and then also puzzles that aren’t just self contained to one area but need items from other areas, and it all leads to a messy sense of paranoia about what needs to be solved NOW and what actually CAN’T be solved just yet. I feel like self-containing puzzles to its own areas is what I’d probably personally prefer in this sort of design, otherwise what’s the point of segmenting all the areas, but regardless, its current structure just felt a bit arbitrary, which like I said, creates a sort of atmosphere, but which also did made some puzzles harder.
I liked the writing! It’s straightforward and unfussy, with some slightly different turns of phrase and grammar choices (to describe it more: the vocab is very simple, the grammar is kind of formal-ish?), but I dunno, I just had an immediate affinity for it. I read through everything, I didn’t start skimming, never got confused, and hey, those are all pretty strong indicators for good description writing. Generally functional descriptions, except that sometimes you’re just told something like “there are exits in all directions” to a room, so I leaned on the EXITS command a lot. Here’s an example of the writing:
At The Moatside
You are standing on the side of a wide moat which stretches out in front of
you and which has every appearance of being very deep. On the other side is
situated a castle, the walls of which are built of enormous blocks of stone
and look to be very strong. The entrance to the castle is by the means of a
massive drawbridge constructed of wood reinforced with iron. The forest ex-
tends right up to the edge of the moat, and blocks exit in all directions
other than to the south which leads back into the forest.
This also has a slight text-being-typed, fade-in effect which I liked for transitional text that happens when moving between rooms.
Overall: maybe there’s a certain alchemy here, or perhaps it’s just the general sense of discovery that carries things, but I think there’s a way this could’ve come off as more generic than it does, with the way it cobbles a lot of fairly well-worn puzzles and places together. But instead it managed to have its own unique voice. I greatly enjoyed pecking away at it over a week or two while also playing through other entries to vary things up.
PARANOIA
Hey this won its category for ParserComp, so I figured I’d try it. I’d already got caught up with everyone else’s comp reviews before playing, so I knew what to expect; spot the difference was the big comparison point.
I noticed another big inspiration though. Just a while back Youtube recommended me a video of a graphical game called Exit 8. And I learned about this whole genre of horror games all probably inspired by PT, which had you repeatedly traveling back and forth along several hallways in a house. In Exit 8, it’s a small little corridor in an underground subway station that you keep looping through in a surreal, liminal space sort of way. And playing through PARANOIA, I recognized that whole offshoot game genre as a clear inspiration–Paranoia’s itch.io page also said this was entered in an “observation duty” jam, which is what I think people are calling these games, and the differences are called anomalies which was also a tip-off.
I think, like Exit 8, there might be a randomization element here though, and I think I just got a particularly simple shuffle. You’re in a room, lights turn off, and then you’re asked if anything in the room changed. You answer right, you keep going, you answer wrong, you start over, and you answer 13 times in a row right to win. I beat it, and I only encountered 3 anomalies(times when the room changed). The three were: a chair that wasn’t a chair, a room filled with water, and a room overgrown with plant life. All three were incredibly obvious, just from the initial LOOK description. My assumption is that there ARE anomalies that actually require me to TOUCH/SMELL/LISTEN or at least EXAMINE things more closely, as the tutorial asked me to do. But I didn’t see any of those. Perhaps pure randomization doesn’t work here, and skewing the dice rolls a bit so players always get a good spread of what there is on offer would be a good idea.
And maybe the randomization is for replayability purposes, but is this a replayable sort of game? I understand the genre perhaps uses randomization, but this is a much shorter experience than something like Exit 8. So though the randomization seems like a fun theoretical sort of element to the experience, in practice just making a series of set static rooms might’ve been fine too I think, in terms of player experience. You make it easier for players to brute-force memorize it, but… is that bad? The pros for that would be it’s easier to design, easier to tailor the experience with no bad rolls like I got. Trade-offs!
(rest of this written a few days after) …Alright, I played this a bit more, saw a few more hidden anomalies this time. Got up to 11 before it reset.
I think a text-based spot the difference/anomaly game was a really interesting experiment and well worth playing, though ultimately not sure if I’d want to regularly play one of these without the initial novelty here. Just a bit of inherent repetition in the commands, which are a bit more tiring than the first-person, mouse-and-keyboard controlled types of games it’s based off of.
Still very well executed here. The specific scientific experiment setup takes off a bit of the creepiness from something like Exit 8 where the differences aren’t explained to you. Atmospheric, though! Good descriptive writing! It also take advantage of text’s ability to use different senses, not just what you can see. And apparently made in a week? Very impressive for a week’s work!
Might work better as a link-based thing instead of parser? If we were to see something else like this in parser, maybe instead of Spot the Difference, something like moving through a building with ten different rooms where you have to locate all the things that seems out-of-place? Don’t think looping the same place has exactly the same or right liminal effect when described versus when it’s seen.
Exit 8 was in fact the game that inspired PARANOIA! I had other influences too, like I’m On Observation Duty and Everloop, but Exit 8 is the one that made me go “I wonder what this would look like as IF?”
On a separate note, you did indeed get an anomaly of a run (if you’ll excuse the pun)—each reset, there’s a 50/50 chance for an anomaly, and only about 10% of them are immediately obvious from the room description.