This game is unusual and interesting, but I’ve had weird experiences with it.
The idea is that it is written in journal format, in Inform, which is a cool idea. Each action is an entire day, and the concept is that you keep ‘weird stuff’ out of there by not messing around with inventory, etc.
I attempted playing it 3 or 4 times, each time enjoying the writing and format but each time struggling to engage with it the way it wants. I’ve had similar experiences before (although no game is exactly like this) with Laid Off at the Synesthesia Factory, Mirror and Queen, and My Angle, which also seek to present the game as a seamless text.
What happened here for me is that I first tried a ‘test the boundaries’ game by just typing random stuff and seeing how long the game lasted. But it didn’t stop; it just kind of went on forever.
I then tried a few real games over about a week. What tended to happen is that I’d get good responses, but then I’d type something wrong and get an error. Errors take up an entire day, and things happen during that time, like your plant dying. So I felt like I was just wasting my game by typing the wrong things.
This happened in all those other games I mentioned too. For me why I struggle with this is that most commands I enter in most parser games result in errors; in a way, the errors are one of the major parts of the game. They instruct you when you’ve reached the edges. Getting an error isn’t necessarily ‘bad’.
I’m pretty sure I never got to where the main gameplay starts. After my plant had died in my final run (the only one in the transcript), I got a message about my blood trickling into the pot, which seems like the main plot point of the story. Has anyone made further progress on this?
blossomrush.txt (15.7 KB)
Edit: Actually, I found the transcript from my attempt to see how long the game lasted:
transcript.txt (28.0 KB)