Kidney Kwest, by Eric Zinda and Luka Marceta with art by Kristina Ness
With a custom parser engine and a stated mission to make itself accessible to kids with no parser experience by accommodating natural language input, Kidney Kwest is an enormously ambitious project.
So how is it, really? Uh…
?:how are you this fine day?
I didn’t understand ‘fine’, ‘day’, and ‘how’. Maybe try: ‘what do you see in there?’?
?:what do you see in there?
a white door, an opening, and you
?:examine me
You are a person that looks like they need a costume for the audition. It also has a hand, a hand, a body.
Your stomach starts to rumble.
Pretty rough. The idea of this game understanding full English sentences is more-or-less a façade; it understands a specific set of commands, like any parser does, with the only difference being that these commands happen to be formatted like (a narrow range of) sentences. There’s still a learning process by which a player will have to determine what is and is not suitable as an input. As for whether contemporary kids can more easily learn the quirks of this engine than those of a more established standby like Inform or Quest, I can only speculate, and my speculation is no. But fortunately the writing buttresses the engine by suggesting working commands during many failure responses; for that reason alone, and not for its insistence on full-sentence inputs, I do think this would be a relatively easy game for a beginner to approach.
As you can see from the above example, the game’s responses could use some polish, and it especially has a tendency to print lists and auto-generated descriptions that are grammatically wonky.
Ostensibly, the main goal is to collect items to make a costume, and I think this element of the game is well-designed. You can pick up different stuff to mix and match into one of several possible costumes. It’s easy, straightforward, and allows the player to personalize their result - all good features for a game targeted toward kids.
But alongside this simple and fun main activity, there are other puzzles that are much more brutal. Starvation is a constant threat, and no matter how much you eat, you will always hunger for more; you cannot explore the world at a natural pace because of the frequent interruption of needing to find food. I accidentally made a fairy very sad because I took too many turns trying to figure out the command to open a box of phosphate binders (the problem was that I was holding two boxes). Every time you eat, you have to venture into your digestive system to collect phosphates manually, which might be somewhat interesting the first time but quickly becomes tedious after having to do the same thing over and over again.
With some proofreading and rebalancing, I think this could become suitable for its intended audience. But in its current state, I’d worry that it might come off as just a frustrating reminder of the difficulties of dealing with kidney disease.