First parser on the list… which I didn’t manage to complete under 2h…
The Vambrace of Destiny by Arthur DiBianca
The Vambrace of Destiny is a dungeon crawler adventure, with limited commands and filled with puzzles. You must go through the different levels of the dungeon, fight monsters, discover treasures, and gather all the spells.
I did not reach the ending. The current review only account for what was played.
Until I reached the second level and was essentially stuck, banging my head against the wall because I could not solve the puzzles, TVoD was quite an enjoyable light parser (especially for a parser-adverse like me). It has limited commands, which are essentially shortcuts; a visible map on the screen (at least in the play online version), which indicate where you are and what rooms you discovered, and reasonable logical puzzles (even the one I got stuck on…), and hints (external document).
The logic of the game is relatively simple: explore the dungeon, find a monster but can’t fight it, explore some more, find a spell, fight the monster with the spell, go to the next bit. As you advance further, the puzzles require extra steps to be solved, often with combinations of actions or “passing a turn”. Even if some puzzles required retracing your steps to unlock further parts, they were quite enjoyable to solve!
I still spent enough time faffing about, pressing the wrong direction on the screen, or forgetting to press a certain command, or just not getting the puzzle, that the clock ran out before I could reach the end. Starting level 2, the puzzles leave the beginner level…
Still, I had quite a bit of fun, and breaking through the blocks on the path, defeating the monsters, and finding the treasures, were pretty satisfying!
I still want to reach the end of the game, and might update this review when I do.
I am currently stuck after the Artificer’s Lab, but can’t manage to unlock the Dungeon yet. . I made a thread for hints, but first… sleep.
Also, sorry, I forgot to input the transcript command at the start… I might even restart the game later, with a fresh transcript/brain.