Parsercomp 2026 Impressions (done! summary of games in #20)

Competitions
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I’m competing this year, so I won’t do any reviews until after the competition is over. Instead, I’d like to do positive and informational impressions of each game.

I’m playing in random order. My first game so far is:
The Priest and the Rennes Alignment by @catventure.

This game is a Windows executable written with TAB, the ThinBasic Adventure Builder developed by Catventure (I believe). This is the second such game I’ve played, the other being The Abbey of the Hidden Rose.

I found this game to run well and feel smooth, with many synonyms implemented. There was gentle guidance; many of the hidden messages said similar things to each other, so I felt confident that I wasn’t missing anything important.

It’s a Dan Brown-style mystery, with an old town where you have to look at different landmarks and find various items and search for a lost adventurer. I encountered no bugs to speak of, which was great.

The text is conversational and breezy, with well-formed grammar and a lot of allusions to mysterious events. Here are two different samples that show location descriptions and conversation:

An old, decaying farmhouse on the outskirts. The interior is filled with forgotten belongings. The roof is partially collapsed, and dust covers everything. Broken furniture is scattered around.
An elderly, weathered man is sitting on an old wooden chair in the corner, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. He has rough, calloused hands and a deeply lined face. He looks up at you with cautious, steady eyes but says nothing at first.

Victor: “Saunière? A complicated man. Poor as a church mouse one day, richer than Croesus the next. He found something in this village - something that changed him. Whether it was gold, knowledge, or a curse… no one truly knows.”

I haven’t finished yet; I’m stuck at 105 points. I’ll attach my transcript here in case anyone has suggestions (I’ve found an aperture but I don’t know what to do with it:
rennes.txt (156.9 KB)

If anyone has any suggestions or tips, I’ll try them out!

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A Quest In Time by Older Timer

I’ve played several of Older Timer’s games. They tend to be Basic-written games that make use of colors or codes and teleportation devices, along with the feature that objects in containers are mentioned in room descriptions but cannot be interacted with until the player types GET ALL FROM [the container], which is handily coded as a shortcut F1.

Generally these games are very long and complex, so I usually play for a short time and use a walkthrough. For this game, I found I could get quite a bit done without the walkthrough, often stopping using it to try out an idea of my own. There were some points I would have gotten stuck, as there are some rooms that don’t mention all exits and I forgot the handy EXITS command.

You are a time traveller on a quest to find a missing person, and you ask about him everywhere you go. You find 6-digit numerical codes which guide you to new places. There you have to find whatever you’re looking for and bring it to the correct place.

The first world’s code is the hardest, though I found it clever. Even with the walkthrough it takes some thinking to know where it came from. Most of the other codes are clear once found. I did find 2-3 puzzles quite tricky. One I’m not sure if it is necessary or not (uprooting a sapling).

All areas are laid out similarly, with an alley way to the east that you come out of leading to a central hub. There are some variations. I especially liked the feel of the medieval area, including a bell that chimed.

I think at one point I couldn’t get the teleporter to work, as when going south I ended up in Rome when I had just teleported to Athens. I couldn’t figure out what was going on, but I tried waiting until the teleportation sound ended and that did the trick, though I didn’t need to do that later (so maybe something else solved it).

The plot of this game was cohesive, and I liked the ending.

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Hi Brian,

Thank you very much for the transcript. You’ve done very well and are close to the endgame!


The tile is the correct object to put in the aperture. I’m sorry you had trouble with it. Having read what you did I can see that Antoine was not present the previous times it didn’t work. This is a bug with the flags - but I have fixed it now and will post an update today. It happened because you solved things in a way I hadn’t expected.. Looking at the transcript end and seeing that Antoine the stranger is now present the command: “put tile in slot” should probably work for you now! Please try it and let me know. I will upload the fixed version later - but if the above command now works you will have solved it by then.

Regards,
catventure.

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Great! I was able to finish after your hint:

rennes2.txt (11.2 KB)

The ending fit together well with the rest of the game, and felt appropriately climactic. Thank you for helping me!

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Alyas of Starhollow by @Lazzah

This is one of many Larry Horsfield games I have played. I’m close to the end but not quite!

The idea is that you are in a village where the elder’s pipe has been stolen. You need to track it down! After a suitable gearing up event, you explore abandoned houses, a castle town, eery woods, and more.

I did what I usually do with these games, which is explore as much as I can and then go to the walkthrough. I was able to find a lot of items, but each time I left the village, I was told to find more. I got almost all the village items without help (reading Mike Russo’s thread helped).

Then, I looked at the walkthrough and saw that I was at action 35 out of 600+, and moved on my way.

As I sped through much of the rest of the game, I reflected on my experience with Larry’s games. For the longest time, when IFDB’s front page had game recommendations, Die Feuerfaust and Axe of Kolt were the ones recommended to me most often. Now I swear I played them, but I don’t seem to have written a review, so I plan on replaying them.

I thought back to the other games. They often center on a combination of using items and of finding items by LOOK UNDER, SEARCH, LOOK BEHIND, and EXAMINE. Armed with knowledge, I always start the games by applying these verbs to many things, but I always miss (for instance, in this game I EXAMINED and SEARCHED 3 scenery things in a room, but only LOOKed UNDER 2. The item I needed was UNDER the third). I like using the walkthrough, though; I almost feel like that is how the games are created, by taking an exciting transcript filled with puzzles and clever moments and then implementing it one room at a time. The games are always very large; I think adrift games in general tend to be among the largest out of all the development systems commonly used. I’ve gotten used to this author’s story-telling style now and enjoy returning to it; I feel like I really know the Blackmoon family and have much of the castle structure memorized (although this game seems to be in a different world with whimsical names for many things).

It made me reflect on Larry’s long and storied career, with games stretching back to the 80s, whereas I only started in 2015. I decided to search his name and see what people had mentioned about him. I found old printed-out zines that mentioned people enjoying his Quill games. I saw people on the Adrift forum mentioning loving his older games; I saw Denk giving high ratings to all of his games at adrift.co. I looked through that forum more (though I’ve been there before) and saw that at one point it had reached 1000 members signed up (I wonder how many are here?) and that the forum has been around for decades. I saw people congratuling Lazzah on his birthday every year. It made me wonder what I’ll be like or what my legacy will be when I’ve been making games for 30-40 years, and even beyond that. It made me think that interacting with the people would probably matter more than the games themselves, and I hope I have the warm wishes of those around me in the future.

After that, I kept playing the game. I found a naked mermaid and had monster sex (which I hadn’t expected, but is crucial to finishing the game). I then entered a bordello and had two prostitutes strip for me while I watched another with a guard. At this point the guide didn’t quite work for me (it told me to go OUT OUT when I had to go SW OUT and then walk around to the door), but I got it to work.

Unfortunately, I then got into a well and got stuck, as the walkthrough mentions feeling the wall to find a brick, and I was unable to do so. I’m so close to the end! Any tips would be appreciated.
walltime.txt (1.9 KB)

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Hi Brian,

Did you go down to the dungeons? If you have been in Zagdor’s chamber and leave, the game will mention a lever on the wall - pull it.

HTH

Larry

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Thank you, with that I was able to finish! The final fight was suitably dramatic, and it was good to have some small downtime afterwards to process what had happened. Very fun.

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I’ve played both “The Woodcutter’s Quest” and “Dead Man’s Chest”. I’m glad I played them in that order. Both of them were a load of fun and I’m glad to do it in that order because “Dead Man’s Chest” was a lot harder. I won’t say anything about them so as not to give them away and I finished both. It is very satisfying to win at these games. I’m excited to play more of them. The hardest part of all this is that I’m a terrible judge because I want to give them all 5 stars because I had fun.

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Interesting you would mention that, because I’m now reading:

The Woodcutter’s Quest by Shaun McClure and @Warrigal

(This is not a full review, just positive impressions like my other parsercomp notes)

This is an interesting parallel. This game was described by Shaun McClure as a hypothetical game in his book How to design adventure games. I looked up a video review of the book and it was fun to look at. Mr McClure was an artist on several games in the 80s and wrote several guides to ZX Spectrum games.

Garry implemented the game based on that written description. I say that’s an interesting parallel because I did the same thing for DC’s game The Most Valuable Card in the World. So that’s fun.

This game features on outdoors wooded setting with a recently-attacked village and a castle at either end of the map and a series of puzzles and challenges in the middle. There are a lot of physics and animal-based challenges, as well as a couple of red herrings.

The game follows the advice in the book well; developers in the book give the advice to not have too much exposition, in order to add more mystery, for instance.

I used hints once or twice, and I went to the walkthrough at one point because I didn’t anticipate (spoiler to a very late puzzle) killing the guard after we had traded with him, but it makes sense in hindsight.

The multiple ending variations was nice, as were the different timer-based challenges like the swamp and goat.

I hope Mr McClure sees this implementation of his game, as I think it will exceed his expectations.

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I died in the swamp and was knocked around by the goat. I did end up with two things at the end that the game ending made a note about. Shaun McClure is listed as a coauthor to the game.

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That’s great! I did notice Shaun McClure was listed as a co-author, that’s one reason I was intrigued and looked at the website.

Do you intend to try every game in the competition?

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I’m going to play as many as I can while on holiday. I’ll try to play them all but whether I finish them all is another story.

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Slappy Squirrel Gets The Girl by @improvmonster

This is a genuinely very funny game. I laughed at a lot of parts.

I was just thinking before this how one thing I really value in a text adventure is adding some storytelling to it. I was thinking, “like a big plot arc or humor”.

Well, this game has a lot of humor. You play as a squirrel named Slappy, and the love of your life has been kidnapped! You have to head into town to save her, only you’ve lost your car keys.

I think the moment I realized this was going to be a great game was when I bemusedly tried painting the bus stop sign. I thought it was really funny that it worked. That’s when I realized that, instead of having regular puzzle solutions, everything in the game was going to be about using the items and objects in the funniest way.

The cliff and safe gags were especially funny to me. Finding the feather, I knew what to do it with it right away, and tried it on everyone, to funny results. Over and over I found a problem and later got something and thought, “Oh, I know where to use that!” which is, to me, great puzzle design. The ambient storytelling is great too, like the signs in the Carnival. Lots of care and detail are put into some of the default messages too.

I had a few hiccups with typing things in and one weird response, but no bugs to speak of. This is definitely my favorite improvmonster game so far, and I’ve added it to my IFDB list of fun comedy games.

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I beta-tested this game, and like you I didn’t anticipate the solution to that puzzle. It seems to be one of those tihngs which was fairly normal in the past, but is now out of step with modern sensibilities.

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This Island is Trying to Kill You

This game is a tribute/spin on 80’s text adventures. Of the ones I’ve played, this reminds me the most of Scott Adam’s Savage Island in terms of geography, but has a lot more humor/random stuff than that specific game.

I learned after restarting that this game is randomized to a certain extent.

The main idea is that you roam an island gathering treasures and helpful objects. The key concept is that the thing you need in one spot is far away from the place you need it, but connected somehow (whether darkness vs light source, locked object vs key, code-requiring thing vs code, etc.). There are also isolated challenges like pattern-guessing boxes and a visual, keyboard generated maze.

The game felt amusing and surreal. There were quite a few deaths, just as advertised, some very entertaining. There were also some nice visual effects (like one related to a coconut).

I had a few minor issues with entering commands (which I’ll forward to the author). I thought I was locked out of victory at one point, but I hadn’t looked carefully. My map was somewhat incomplete because there were two rooms that I didn’t realize would overlap in a traditional rectangular grid, and one room could be accessed by going north from two different rooms but going south only went to one (these aren’t bugs or complaints, just warnings for potential players!).

I haven’t tried brutal mode but it sounds interesting!

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Thank you @mathbrush for the very kind impressions! Also I appreciate the bug report, that’s interesting. I’m looking forward to playing Bank Robbery later!

Island is a homage to games from a very specific time. It used to be common for games of that era (especially in BASIC) to whip up a 2-dimensional array, randomly seed a bunch of treasures and monsters, and boom, that was your game map. I still have a couple of very old programming books with type-in games that did this. This was pretty great for machines with tight memory constraints, and easy to code. It was also common to make the player loop if they went off the map; if they went north on the top of the map, the game would put the player on the bottom row. Early Kings Quest was especially notorious for this.

This made no sense to me. I’ve never been in a real area that does this, and it would be terrifying anyways, but games used to do this all the time. Island instead randomly creates the game map in such a way that is designed to be baroque; the player is meant to feel a bit lost because of the desert island setting.

However: if at any point you’re feeling somewhat confused, type MAP and the game will print out nearby locations you’ve already explored.

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That’s such a cool technique! Thanks for sharing!

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Dead Man’s Chest

This is one of Garry Francis’s most complex and polished games. You are in search of a pirate’s treasure, and his heirs have died, leaving his estate abandoned and up for grabs.

You must search through the estate and solve a series of puzzles, some laid as traps or obstacles by others (like locked doors and riddles) and others due to circumstances (like trying to find a light source).

When this opened, I thought, “Nice, I really like the descriptiveness here.” A lot of the outdoor settings were also evocatively described.

I did use hints about 6 or 7 times. Somehow, my brain just wasn’t in synch with the puzzles all of the time (for instance, I thought I could use the bolt cutters to get the rope). I appreciated that the hints were generally nudges instead of giveaways, and often I was able to complete a large chunk of the game after a nudge (on at least 2 occasions, the issue was that I hadn’t noticed an exit, so I definitely recommend following the game’s advice to draw a map!)

Overall, this author has a reputation for polished adventure games with classic gameplay. This game exemplifies those attributes.

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Help! I am Locked in a Fortune Cookie Factory!, by outgrabe

This is the last game I’ll be doing positive-only impressions of for this comp (I wrote or helped write both the other games).

This is an amusing game which is defined by its limitations. It is coded to be able to run on a tiny device that is like a stripped down Gameboy with only a D-Pad and an A and B button.

Text can only fit a few words on the screen at a time, so you must wait patiently until text has fully streamed across the screen, ticker-tape style. Sometimes you must press the B button for more text. Holding right on the D-pad speeds up text.

While keyboard input is allowed, the intended gameplay style is to select through a wheel of the whole alphabet plus space and SEND, using the a key to type things out before hitting send. Once one letter is typed, hitting right on the dpad autocompletes it.

This can take a long time. Fortunately, the game is short. The perfect transcript only has 17 commands.

One interesting feature is that directions are not reciprocal. If you go East, instead of going West to return, you type BACK. Wherever you are in the game, typing BACK will take you to the starting room if you type it enough.

If someone is struggling, the basic structure of the game (as revealed in the helpful FAQ) is that you must attempt to escape in five different ways. If you’re struggling to find the right words, it can be simplified as the only verbs needed for those escapes (besides movement and TAKE) are ||use. That’s actually the only verb you need, if you have the right items!|| Then the game gives you a message for the finale.

This is a great example of ultra-minimization, and not something I’ve really seen. It reminds me a bit of spaceflounder’s one letter parser. It made me interested in how this game might play on an actual thumb device.

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So, here’s a summary of the games:

Alyas of Starhollow, by Larry Horsfield
Very large Adrift game with walkthrough. Fantasy world with castle, combat, romance, wizards.

Dead Man’s Chest, by Garry Francis
Big Inform puzzle game, completable in an hour or two. Hints in each room, comes with map and walkthrough. Traditional treasure hunt with one big treasure to be found through several smaller puzzles. Explore an abandoned house once owned by a wealthy pirate.

The Woodcutter’s Quest, by Garry Francis
Medium-Big Inform game, slightly shorter than Dead Man’s Chest and inspired by the example in a book on how to write adventures. A fantasy game with a map and a solution. You are a woodcutter, and you discover your village has been ransacked. Lots of outdoor scenes and puzzles.

Grand Island Bank Robbery, by mathbrush
My game. Medium-big Inform game. In-game hints. You are part of a bank robbery and have been asked to find a list of treasures. Set in the great depression.

The Most Valuable Card in the World, by DC and mathbrush
A game I coded for a dad who wrote it for his daughter. All writing and puzzle ideas are his. A big Inform game where you start with a cheap trading card and swap it until you can get the Most Valuable Card in the World. Comes with hint sheet.

Help! I am Locked in a Fortune Cookie Factory!, by Outgrabe
Very short game about escaping a cookie factory. Uses a special system where you scroll through a letter wheel and use autocomplete to proceed. QWERTY typing is also enabled.

The Priest and the Rennes Alignment, by catventure
Medium Thin Basic Adventure Builder game. Explore a European town looking for a disappeared man. Talk to many NPCs, discover hidden secrets (with a feel like Dan Brown). I couldn’t find hints, but it was definitely finishable.

A Quest In Time, by Jim MacBrayne (as Older Timer)
A large BASIC game where you travel through time to follow and save another time traveller, if you can. Ranges from Greece to Medieval Ages to more modern times. Code-based puzzles. Has a walkthrough.

Slappy Squirrel Gets The Girl, by Charles Moore, Jr.
A medium-large Inform comedy game with cartoon like humor. You are a squirrel and need to rescue the girl you love. Has a hint sheet.

This Island is Trying to Kill You, by spaceflounder
A large randomized game that emulates old-school parsers. You explore an island, trying to find treasures and escape death. Includes a randomized graphical maze and some simple math puzzles.

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