A Walk Around the Neighborhood
A light-hearted, fun little one-room game. It’s goofy; it’s charming; it knows exactly what it is and what it wants to be, and sets out to be exactly that. The edges of the simulation are well crafted, with plenty of give for player mistakes or misconceptions, with clear guides to get you back on track.
One of the things it did very well was accept more general verbs to do things that didn’t require performing all the steps by hand, and did that in way that I naturally tried out the verb anyway (despite that sort of glossing-over stuff not often working in parser IF), and it was always pleasant when it happened. It meant that I could focus on figuring out the correct approach to solving a puzzle, without getting bogged down in the details. (This stymied me in the post-game extra puzzle scene, where a simple ‘make’ verb suddenly didn’t work for the extra thing I wanted to do, and I couldn’t figure out the syntax to do it the step-by-step way! But I’ll forgive it that, because it’s a bonus puzzle anyway; I didn’t feel too bad about not being able to solve it.)
If I’m going to nitpick anything, it’s that there’s an in-game hint system, of sorts, where you can talk to your spouse about the puzzles you haven’t solved yet, and they’ll give you clues. However, they also will talk to you about other things, and talking to them is actually required to solve one of the puzzles! At least as far as I could tell. This meant that when I was treating ‘chatting with your spouse’ as a hint system, I would avoid it until I was stuck, at which point I’m already mildly frustrated. And then I discovered that talking to them was the actual solution! It was a weird code-switching thing—if I had known that ‘using the hint system’ wasn’t actually always ‘using the hint system’, I might have thought to use it to solve the puzzle. And who knows; maybe there was another non-spouse method of solving that puzzle. But it was weird.
At any rate, a very solid game that was a delight to play.
Did the author have something to say? : Not particularly, but there were also no pretentions of wanting to do so and failing: it was very clear from the opening text what sort of game this was, and ‘the author has something profound to convey’ was never going to be part of that.
Did I have something to do? : Yes! And the game made it particularly easy for me to do it, which was even nicer.