I played Michael D. Hilborn’s “Octopus’s Garden.”
The game falls in the “apartment” genre of IF, which, despite being pretty tropey, is also subverted pretty often, as noted in this list by @Mathbrush.
“Octopus’s Garden” is one of the subversive entries, I guess, because you’re playing as an octopus rather than any of the apartment residents.
The gimmick that I expected — that you have eight arms — doesn’t come into play. Or at least I didn’t pick up enough things to find out if that mattered.
In fact, you’re only required to use a specific octopus ability once (ink), and your only octopus-related limitations are your size and the fact that you need to regularly return to your tank for oxygen.
The way that the game handles your size is the most interesting of those things. There’s only a few rooms in the game, which means that negotiating furniture and fixtures is a big part of the game.
There’s a particularly intuitive puzzle where you need to open and close dresser drawers in order to climb the dresser. (I think that, later on, you need to close one drawer to descend in few enough turns, but I’m not sure about that.) This isn’t explained outright at all, so it’s pretty nice how logical it feels.
There are some awkward things. The game uses N/E/S/W etc., plus up and down, for navigation. Going down always takes you to the floor, but you have to specify what you want to climb, so it feels a bit uneven.
The clothesline is mapped north-south rather than up or down, but is also climbable, so that’s something for players to be aware of.
I think the game probably would probably benefit if it dropped compass directions altogether and used keyword-based navigation in the vein of Blue Lacuna. Then again, that might interfere with the turn-based based puzzle (descending from the dresser).
As for the story: it’s gently humorous and presented in an interesting way.
I initially assumed that the goal was simply to escape the apartment, based on the “change of scenery” in the game’s description.
In fact, you need to show your owner that her boyfriend is cheating on her by placing evidence of that. The octopus itself is blind to the nature of the love triangle in a kind of aloof way. You, the player, however, know that you’re setting up the scene in order to expose the cheating boyfriend, despite the octopus’ ignorance.
That seems like a plot hole, but the octopus also seems to have just enough awareness of what it’s trying to do that the situation kind of makes sense.
I think it’s helped by the fact that the player comes into the situation ignorant, but in a different way — aware of the human implications but unaware of the end goal.
As for the puzzles, some are more intuitive than others. I only think that one (the ink puzzle) was out of left field.
Then again, I’m not great at puzzles, so other players might find some of the trickier bits approachable. There’s a built-in walkthrough with incremental hints so I’d recommend it whether you’re good or bad at puzzles.
