Closure, by Sarah Willson
Right away, I was impressed with the presentation of Closure, which simulates a smartphone-style text conversation within a parser game - complete with speech bubbles! The entire thing is framed as the protagonist sending and receiving messages to/from their friend, who acts out or otherwise responds to the player’s input.
I think this is an excellent idea. It’s the only example I’ve seen of a parser game directly contextualizing the player’s act of typing within the simulated world (although admittedly I have not played enough parser games to know if this really is the first to do such a thing). Either way, I like the concept a lot, and it’s very robustly-implemented. I tried to break the system by typing obviously incorrect things, and was usually met with a more-or-less plausible reply from the friend; I only noticed one command that failed to produce a proper in-universe text and instead defaulted to Inform’s normal failure response. From a technical design and implementation perspective, I would call this an enormous success.
Somewhat more spoilery musings for the initiated:
It is quickly stated that the goal of the game is to help your friend find a picture (while she is trespassing in her ex-boyfriend’s bedroom and rifling through his stuff, naturally). I find this a fairly hilarious concept for a game.
But the real beauty of it is revealed as it gradually becomes apparent that finding the literal picture is nothing more than a nominal goal; the real thrust of the story is that you help her get the metaphorical picture. That is, you help her come to a deeper understanding of who the ex-boyfriend really is as a person, and what went wrong in the relationship. A neat, concise bit of symbolism that really sold the story for me.