INCREDIBLE BELOVED 5/5 PARSERCOMP 2025 REVIEWS (free) (they will Cost You)

Competitions
1
Tin Star by The BDB Project

Suitable for a digital artifact, many layers of mediation await our excavation, but true historians, we leave all this clutter to the earth to claim the story which best fits the page. Why bother parsing who wrote what? Written by someone in the 80s based on tropes written endlessly since the 1880s to be written by someone else in the 80s to be translated by, depending upon which recension of the credits you credence, one person or another person or probably Google, what’s one to make of intent? Here, the best source is the bandits: you hunt down this murderous roving gang, so they politely tie you up next to your blanket and a fire and your horse, inviting you graciously to the puzzle, these “outlaws with no past and no future.”

Though rather than fog our way round warehouses, the salient quiddity to survive the muddling of intermediacies is an awe for Arizona’s austere beauty: we ride the vastness of deserts and grasslands, descend into crevasses and mines, and, most memorably, traipse along a rickety rope bridge over “the high rocky walls of the gorge” in which “a raging torrent rushes away”. The game’s insistence that we lead our horse to water, mount and dismount it, climb ropes, seek out summits, and blast our way through rock blazes a lively path through the scorching landscape.

This outdoorsy romping traverses the 80s terseness to reach us through the translation as a timeless appeal, a star to guide us through mostly perfunctory puzzling. Sometimes a hatchet lies a room over from a wooden door in need of hatcheting, other times there’s a blanket you should’ve picked up at the beginning or you’ll be going back to the beginning to get it. If the connection ever gets too complicated, the examine will helpfully explain, hey, this object is the solution to a puzzle, make sure to use this to solve this puzzle: “Some very high trees grow close to the edge of the chasm. Maybe cutting one down could help you to cross it.” When Tin Star does hazard up a more complex sequence, like a shootout with bandits or having to revive a dying man, the solution cuts straight through the complexity, go ahead and “>shoot”, what are you waiting for, hurry up and “>revive him”.

The premier exception to this is the centrepiece puzzle, requiring you to seek out a high point and make a smoke signal, which demands that you piece together everything you’ve picked up along the way and contemplate that way you’ve wandered in a satisfying grounding. Since the landscape is the strength, we ought to play to it.

Nothing I’ve said matters, of course, you’ve already agreed. At one time they recorded this game to magnetic tape as a series of square waves to be interpreted bit by bit into a ZX Spectrum. You had to encode magnetically an exact sequence of short, medium, or long vibrations to pulse binary into this inscrutable space obelisk engineered by Babelist hubris so it could summon unto you Sedona and its mesas. What a precious, innocent time that was, a world still yet unblemished by me.

13 Likes
2

I am not a native speaker, so your high-level prose is too hard for me to fully understand. Yet, despite clearly not liking it, I still thank you for the time you spent playing my game. I’ll try to do better next time.

5 Likes
3

It’s rather opaque to this native English speaker as well! Almost as though it went through a “translate this to language ” several times before finally arriving atn English. Or a chat-gpt tool asking it to “make this more flowery”.

The first paragraph basically says the game is set in the old west of the states. The second says that the player has to enter commands to make progress. The third says the game’s puzzles are not very hard, and any that aren’t straightforward have good hints. The fourth says that the final(?) puzzle was harder than the others but “satisfying”. The last paragrah looks like it’s both trying to be self-deprecating, and trying to say that the game is similar to those of the early days of interactive fiction.

5 Likes
4

Well, thanks for clarifying it. I really appreciate.

With that being said, it is exactly as the entire project (still to be disclosed) is going to be: an enhanced port of old 1987 Italian adventure games, never-before seen in English. People may like them or not, but I believe it was important for me to delve into it this way.

I chose to make enhancements, instead of full-blown remakes, in order to preserve the spirit of the original games to allow everyone to experience what IF really was back then.

As said, people may like it or not. In any case, I will be grateful for any feedback players will want to send.

Gianluca

3 Likes
5

Thank you @markm. I’m also a native English speaker and I found the review quite obtuse. I wasn’t sure if it was a good review or a bad review or possibly a bit of both. I didn’t want to say anything, as my name is in the credits. Your summary now makes a bit more sense of it.

For what it’s worth, an early version of the game was accidentally submitted to the comp. This version was playable, but certainly not what was intended. Apologies to anyone who played this version and was disappointed.

I’ve been madly badgering away to clean up the mess. I’ve just finished release 2 and am about to give it a final test. I’ll run it past @g0blin and upload it to itch in the next 12 hours or so.

Incidentally, I regard this is Gianluca’s game. I just assisted with the redesign, English, lots of enhancements and coding of some particularly difficult stuff (such as rope, liquids and the horse). The clean-up was done in a hurry, but I hope we’ve got it right this time.

3 Likes
6

The setting was fun. The puzzles were somewhat simple. The 1980s are interesting. 3 out of 5 stars.

15 Likes
7

Sometimes I think it must be somewhat unrewarding to, every competition season or so, return to the forum and spin out a thread of these little gifts, wild tangles of richly textured prose, not quite recognizable as game reviews but certainly unrecognizable as anything else. Those who come looking for straightforward summaries and takeaways never seem to find what they were looking for, and say so - but those of us who come for exactly this particular thing, because where else could you possibly get it, just bask in it for a moment and then click the little heart, because what else could there possibly be to say?

20 Likes
8

My reading of the review is that the reviewer liked the game, appreciated the project, and is even quite nostalgic about text adventures from the 80s :+1:t2:

5 Likes
9

+1 to this. I’m not a native English speaker, but Kaemi’s reviews is one reason why I keep visiting this forum.

12 Likes
10

For what it’s worth, release 2 of ‘Tin Star’ has been uploaded to itch.io, together with the corrected map, solution and selected 8-bit versions of the games. This is the correct version that was originally intended to be uploaded with some further tweaks and testing.

If you haven’t played the game, don’t read the following spoilers. For those that have, the main corrections are:

* You have to ride your horse across the grassy plain.

* A rattlesnake blocks the path to the plateau.

* The Apaches are much better hinted.

* The layout of the mine tunnels is different and the exit from the mine makes more sense.

* An unwinnable situation is prevented at the abandoned pueblo.

* There’s also a hint system.

2 Likes
11
Eye by Arthur DiBianca

Why is it that you, weak of will, consider a sudoku a puzzle, it requires no concentrated response of alignment, you cell by cell sculpt til the form is freed, voila, are you satisfied? No, in my arrogance, wise of ways, I demanded more than Eye offered, always the path to exhaustion. Initially Eye asks you, or not even really asks you, nudges you to color by numbers: “The old man says, “Another very useful word is known as the Sphinx, which tours the pyramids. The Sphinx has the head of a lion, the body of a rat, and the tail of a wolf.” / “But that’s not a real word,” says one student. / "You are correct. Not all words are real words.”” The solution here is LAF: the first letter is the first letter of lion, the second letter is the middle letter of rat, the third letter is the last letter of wolf. An arbitrary set of instructions formulating its answer for you to fill in, for what? If the initial lateral form of reading pleases you, then it quickly saps your soul in sudokus like: ““I have learned how to get in,” says one servant. / “Tell me!” / The servant looks around cautiously. “One, twelve, and three.”” The answer being, counting up letters, alc, voila, are you satisfied?

Quite quickly you’re tapping your foot in anticipation of the revelation. The suffusion of Egyptian imagery suggests hieroglyphics, which can encode multiple syllables into phonogrammatic signs, but actually the travel codes follow a simple 5-4-1 pattern of location name to code, e.g. library → arl, which is a rule instantiated, as far as I can tell, entirely for the satisfaction of pyramid → map. The words of power you unlock are all equally as arbitrary: the signposted goal, attaining the rose, requires you to solve three minigames, each of which provides a letter, which jumble together meaninglessly: “oxd - that word’s body for a head / cab - head of a viper for a tail / bed - tail of a skink for a body”, XVK xyzzys you the END.

So you attain the rose, much to the envy of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, so we attain the revelation: you have collected x out of y points, go back and pzl! Here then is when the puzzling truly begins, transliterating the number of days in a year to letters, transliterating prime numbers into letters, mirroring the count of letters from one code to another, implying letters missing in phrases, counting up animals into ciphers, all dizzied through a map to make you long for the precisions of pyramids.

Perhaps you vibe with the puzzling, in which case, let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend. If you don’t, then there’s nothing else; here’s a room description spartan to its purpose: “This room is quite warm. Pots and utensils are scattered around the counters, and more hang from hooks. A fire is roaring underneath a wide stove.” What little details appear here are hints jammed in for your careering condensery. QED.

13 Likes
12
Lockout by xkqr

The nuclear deterrent is frequently misunderstood as mutually assured destruction through glistening missile arrays just a trigger finger away from apocalypse. In reality, the nuclear deterrent disincentivizes proliferation primarily through the heartstarching inevitability of some undertrained overexcited gutreactor yaketysaxing cascading radioreactive incompetencies to chainreacted gigachernobyl grayouts. Did you know there are currently dozens of unexploded nuclear bombs lying on the seafloor? It just was kind of a routine thing during the Cold War, whoops, there goes another one.

Lockout’s nuclear submarine bears this rich legacy proudly. A desk in the engine controls has railings that “are useful to keep people from accidentally knocking things off the desk … one has to walk past the railing carefully because a piece came loose when Butterfingers wanted to show he could jump over it.” Perhaps we could have foreseen an issue when we entrusted our nuclear deterrent to Butterfingers, but then again, it seems we’ve not foreseen much of anything. The game’s setpiece puzzle is that the automated disaster response automatically seals off the engine room, stranding you, which raises several questions like, why would you do that, why do we even want to abandon our station in the engine room during an electrical incident, how is this the second time this has happened on this voyage, maybe we should just spend our tax dollars on roads or something. Moreover, an emergency red light strobes you blinded, so literally the first step in disaster response is shutting off the disaster response so you can respond to the disaster. More questions emerge as we do respond to the disaster, like why is the wheel that opens the tool cabinet impossible to open, why is there no battery in the door controls, how come almost everything we need to do was already covered in training and we’ve clearly learned none of it.

The answer is, as you’ve guessed, it’s an escape room, fiddly dependencies pushing you to seek out square one forms the throughline. Once you’ve opened the door, the rest is shrugged: “You make your way out of the door, and find your crewmates in tight concentration on the command deck. You work out a plan and manage to preserve the vessel and your lives.” The room itself, then, fine. There’s some reasonable text adventury finicking, and I generally enjoy the genre of patiently simulate a diegetic skill. The issue that shortfuses this fun is blurriness, a vague sense of uncontact with each system you manipulate. Interactions can struggle with the daunting of their implementation, as when you need to search through training logs, but the desk with the training logs awkwardly rebuffs you: “The papers from the desk seem to be notes from various training exercises. You arrange them neatly on the desk so you can read them if you want to, but they seem meaty, so you’d prefer knowing whether any of them are relevant before you read them.” You already have to know which ones you want to read, which you find out by reading all of them one by one in the logbook to find out which ones you want to read, which causes them somehow to show up in the desk, which you can’t search, but you can just read? Similarly, at several points you pull up a help screen on the smaller screen you need to disambiguate from the monitor, which awkwardly mutters that you can’t read the help screen on the help screen, “the best way to read this help file is as a printed book, not on screen”, so instead you need to bring it up on the screen after which you can read the help, except when you get the right help screen, which isn’t the help screen page mentioned in the training notes but is a page that is mentioned in the training notes you type into the help screen, which is read straight off the help screen text.

As you’ve probably guessed, the answer to these issues is “Lockout is the first parser game released by the author, and as such may contain all kinds of quirks and odd bits.” Let’s instead then celebrate the author’s promise! Underthrumming Lockout is genuine interest in intertwining die Mensch-Maschine in procedure, the way in which our exertions to torque mechanisms exert us into the mechanizing logic, as ever more exacting you learn your response role are you extended through this ingineering resonates the beauty of the emerging capability you radioperate, which emerges as a playerfriendliness in the metalayer as the parser extends conditionalities to symphony the elegant consistencies you input output mediate, infusing the interaction not with mystic extravagance but a grounded realism of trial and error, confusion and learning, which, after some trial and error, we can hope our beloved parser catalyzes.

9 Likes
13
The journey by paravaariar

What’s gone isn’t gone but radiates your negative space. The last little enclosure you’ve fortressed, the “scream” where “the silence and darkness vanish”, haunts the stranded your uninhabitable.

Our metaphor, then, a space station held at arms’ length from unreachable life, transcribes complex emotions with the swift immediacy of shorthand. The writing’s percussive simplicity carries the pulse to steady rhythm. “In this voyage through horizonless landscapes, / I reach out toward memories” imposes the central conundrum, you cannot escape what you cannot leave behind, in an efficiency which elicits the engineer’s expression of elegance. Tight designs demand minimum torque at each joint, a soft touch that trusts each piano echoes the awaiting of the room. The game achieves this simplicity at several points, softfocusing stars to snowflakes to scintillate the composing metaphor, spacestation to the hollows in the home, with a few fleet delights like a child’s wonder of astroneering clashing against the father’s architectural supersedence furnishing just enough justification to satisfy the sole puzzle.

Unfortunately, acceleration towards a climax tempts our author towards explanations. Initially, this merely flattens the affect, with the old man explaining everything we’ve intuited since scene one in prose that struggles to add anything by adding anything. Sadly, this frustration accelerates alike to the climax, with the grand revelation annihilating the accumulated artistry: “It’s a photo of a child — not me — with my father and a woman I don’t recognize. The child, whose features resemble those of the old man from the ship, is wearing a birthday hat. On the photo, there’s a date: February 12th, the second part of my father’s password. If the child is the old man, he ate this corpse and hid it in his secret room.” The first sentence hits the gas, and for a moment everything holds together, but the swerving of the second and third sentence, haphazardly hazarding what we could very well guess, crashes in the ridiculous fourth sentence to a fireball from which we may only hope to Romain Grosjean.

Like its spacestation, the purpose of The journey is to be suspended gracefully in negative space. We should resolve its central conundrum through affirmation of the tensions: “I had left empty spaces, and he says that every place in a spaceship must have a function.” The empty spaces have a function, Dad, not least that they must contain you.

9 Likes