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

Competitions
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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

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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?

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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:

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

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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.

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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.

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