The Paper Magician
The Paper Magician features a PC with the ability to manifest anything they write on paper into reality. This could have been an interesting gameplay conceit, but ultimately it only features in non-interactive scenes; the gameplay consists of exploring the facility in which the PC is held in order to find the passwords for the exit doors.
This is neatly integrated with the plot; each of the four passwords is the answer to a question about the PC’s true nature and how they came to be here, so progress comes from exploration of the world and backstory, which both introduce some intriguing concepts that I would be interested to see expanded on further. But it’s a little prosaic compared to the kind of interactions the PC’s powers could theoretically enable, so I was a bit let down. The choice to end with an opportunity for the PC to name themself, though, felt fitting and satisfying. And I am admittedly a sucker for a feline companion.
A couple minor frustrations:
I had some trouble understanding the layout of the facility; this was probably because of my poor ability to visualize, but it was a little unintuitive to me that the door marked “NW” wasn’t “the northwestern door”, but “the door to the room in the northwestern quadrant, whatever direction that is relative to where you are right now.” But people who aren’t used to relying on the cardinal directions of exits in IF to substitute for the ability to make a mental map of how rooms are connected may be less thrown by this.
I was also thrown by the fact that the passwords were case-sensitive - I suppose, since you are typing them into a computer in-universe, this makes sense, but the question-and-answer format somehow led me to expect they wouldn’t be, and it took me a while to understand why my answers kept being rejected as incorrect.