Headlights
So, there’s two things to review here: the game itself, and the game system that was used to create it. For the system itself, it’s an attempt at being a natural language parser, which is a great goal, but of course it ends up being much worse than your standard Infocom/TADS/Inform parser: doesn’t understand ‘it’, crappy error messages, no scripting, annoying “I understood you to say ‘x the y’” messages every time you type ‘x y’, an inventory limit of two. I mean, come on. It’s impossible for me to know where the system ends and the game begins, and it’s certainly possible that some very different game exists or could exist that would actually make use of its purported ability to parse things like ‘what color is the rock I am holding’, but it’s hard to see how this ability actually would translate into a better game, when I can just say ‘x rock’ or maybe ‘x held rock’ and get the same information.
The game itself is, sadly, terrible. It’s not well implemented, the prose is short, stark, and aggressively unevocative, the puzzles are trivial, and the story is also trivial. Well, the puzzles were trivial until I found one I couldn’t solve. I could wash a bloody deer, leaving it ‘very shiny’, though, so there’s that. I assume it’s yet another ‘a bad thing happened and the protagonist retreats into a realm of fantasy and metaphor to deal with it’ story? I think? I didn’t quite get to that part, though. And the ‘box text’ didn’t really match the game text nor the gameplay, either.
Did the author have something to say? : No, the author had a not-very-great thing to show off.
Did I have something to do? : Technically? But it was awkward, and either simplistic or opaque. It would have been 20% better just using the Inform world model, but only 20%.