Parsercomp 2026 Impressions

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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