Swap Wand User by Sarah Willson/Passerine
The Wheel o’ Reviews has once again chosen hilariously, putting this and EYE back to back after I noted their shared quirk in EYE’s review. It wasn’t intentional, I swear!
These are also the only two ParserComp games I managed to play during the judging period, and it’s likely I won’t review many more in this thread with so many RAT games still to write up. (There is at least one more I’m curious about, so we’ll see if it makes an appearance.)
Also like EYE, this is a limited parser involving word manipulation. I’ll stop comparing them here, though, because Swap Wand User takes an entirely different approach, focusing narrowly on one type of deduction: which word goes where? As a Neo-Twiny Jam entry, space is at a premium, and the word-swapping mechanic allows plenty of room for puzzling within those boundaries. More importantly, though, it allows for those few words to have maximum impact as the player pieces together what’s really going on. By the time I was making the final choice of words to exchange - and it is truly a choice, with multiple endings based on your selection - there was a sense of complicity in the decision and its possible horrible implications.
The puzzles are very much in service of the story here, including their in-universe reason for existence, which is satisfying if highly speculative. As much as I’d like to know more about Lucross and its doings, though, I think this was a good length to showcase this particular mechanic without fatigue setting in. I’m not sure a longer version of this would have held up. As it is, it’s short, snappy, and haunting.