…which is a recurring theme in ADRIFT. Gamers try pronouns, they backfire, gamers give up, and then they learn that they had the right idea but the pronoun wasn’t being picked up properly. This has happened to me SO often. And then the authors say “it said in the text what you had to type”. To which I reply “But what I typed in was equivalent, and should have worked.” And you can say that it’s the author, not the system, who is to blame. Not so. Often did I “>examine dresser” and “>open it” to be treated to a “You can’t open that” message, and then went to type “>open dresser”, which worked.
In this particular case - I admit I was just skimming over the game, just before I called it a night and went to bed, and in skimming over the text Oxblood looked like an animal - and really, you can’t blame me. He acts like one. I wouldn’t saddle and mount a person. He didn’t say anything yet, just snorted. And in this case, it would be, indeed, more of the author’s responsibility to allow “it” to be referrable to Oxblood.
But let’s make one thing clear. Ok, the text says “mount Oxblood”. But if I type something equivalent, which I did, and the game doesn’t recognize it, that’s a problem.
And you’re also missing the major point. Even if I HAD typed “mount Oxblood’s whistle”, the game’s reply, which is the reply to “whistle”, is woefully incorrect. It’s replying as though I’d typed “whistle”. It picked up a noun in the command and interpreted it as a verb. That’s the really major point.
One final thing - if I have to run over the game code to see how a character is defined in order to know what pronoun to use… well, something is wrong.
EDIT - Took me this long to realize what you meant by “mounting the saddle”. Well, no, not at all. If “saddle ” and “mount it” meant “mount the saddle”, then it would all have to be redefined, in a nightmarish way, all the pronouns in all IF environment. THe structure is verb-noun. If the noun is “it”, it refers to the last noun.
Also, to be honest, no, it doesn’t sound as though it can really be interpreted as “mount the saddle” at all.