This round I skipped the randomizer and chose a game because I recognized the author’s name, “Operative Nine” by Arthur DiBianca.
“Operative Nine”, like many of the author’s previous puzzlers, is written with a parser engine (Inform) but employs only a limited verb set. The player character is an agent sent into a rival compound to complete a list of missions (specific acts of espionage or sabotage). The gimmick here is that obstacles to completing these missions are presented in the form of a series of sokoban mini games. Sokoban are a classic style of box pushing puzzles, here rendered in ASCII character graphics.
Hijacking a parser engine to play non-parser games is something which has been called “parser abuse” or “abuse of the z-machine” Here’s a whole list of examples on IFDB. I find these examples at once impressive and silly. If you want to write a non-parser game, why choose a parser engine? But then I’ve had my own fun subverting the Excel spreadsheet to play Conway’s game of Life, so why not.
I enjoy sokoban games, and completed “Operative Nine” in about an hour. There is a helpful tutorial game to get the player initiated to the keypad controls. Next, there are more than a dozen game-world puzzles (some of them multi-staged). The puzzles are unique, each one introducing a new and slightly different game mechanic. Most of them were intuitive and satisfying. I checked the hints three times: once to get just a nudge, once because I understood the solution but felt it would be too tedious to complete myself, and once (on the Mainframe puzzle) because I had no idea what was going on. My two favorite puzzles were dismantling the bomb, and the passodex box. But really, they were all so clever.