Last House on the Block
Last House on the Block is a piece of parser IF about a pair of kids exploring a house.
The premise is fun (exploring abandoned areas is always a good time) and your companion LiYuan is pretty well implemented. She wanders about on her own, and there are several instances where she has fun reactions to what you’re doing–picking flowers, or taking a box of old cereal off of your hands. In general, the writing is pretty good, and there’s some amusing responses to player actions, including a long line of responses you can go down if you try to open an old fridge or wear an old man’s suit. There are three different companions you can play with, and, while I didn’t play through with any but LiYuan, that variety is pretty neat.
Unfortunately, the game stumbles in other areas. The house is crammed full of items, but you can’t interact with the vast majority of them in any meaningful way. There’s probably an argument that the surplus of useless items makes the game more realistic, or is a puzzle in and of itself. I’m open to that philosophy, but I think you still need to make every item do something, even if that something is just “have a funny joke if you examine it.” As is, the game discourages exploration, because most of the time exploration has no reward.
The puzzles are also hard to fathom. I got into the house, but I couldn’t figure out how to light up the dark room, and there’s no way I would have thought to move the couch in the basement to find the secret door. Pushing a knitting cabinet up two sets of stairs is not an intuitive way to get to a trap door (why can’t I stand on LiYuan’s shoulders?), and, since almost no other places in the game support repeated examination, I would never have thought to repeatedly examine the dresser.
There’s fun in Last House on the Block, but it’s extremely diluted–the game needs condensation. To its credit, you could improve it significantly just by cutting things. Getting rid of a lot of the items would make exploration feel more fruitful, and help focus the player on the objects that are relevant to puzzles. You’d even have an in-fiction explanation for it–the movers have already taken most of old man Jenkins’ items away. Foregrounding the idea that pushing items around is an important part of the game space would be extremely helpful as well–maybe there’s some junk blocking a door you need to push aside?
Overall, I found the game pretty frustrating, but there’s a lot of good here–it just needs more focus.
Miscellaneous Thoughts:
-If you try to examine your companions, you’ll get some variation on “LiYuan looks the same as she usually does,” which is almost worse than no response at all–the author realized I wanted to know what she looked like, but refused to tell me!
-There is an inventory limit, which bugged me given the amount of stuff laying around in the house. It also led me to not realize I had a phone, which is a key puzzle component–I would frequently drop all when I wanted to pick something else up, and I lost my phone in the piles of things I was lugging around.
-There seemed to be a lot of time spent on the companions, but they have very little game impact, which contributes to the scattershot feel of the game.
