An exciting new batch of parser games! Oh how I love the prompt.
Wild West by The BDB Project
Exactly what it says on the tin. A straightforward western adventure, with shimmering desert mirages and all.
It’s essentially a puzzleless trek through a typical wild west setting in a quintessential wild west story. There are plenty obstacles and encounters which serve as story beats, small episodes which might get a whole chapter if this were static fiction, but here it suffices to enter the one or two commands that the game (and the wild west setting) suggests to advance the plot. Anyone with some slight knowledge of western tropes will have no problem. (Except that first sequence in the desert: you’re at the end of the road and you need some tracking skills. X DESERT, X HOOF PRINTS. That one had me walking in cirkles for a while…)
I had tons of fun in this version of the Wild West. Great atmosphere, a small but twisting map, spot-on use of western tropes.
@BDBProject (anyone know if one of the BDBProjecteers has a working handle here?) I made a transcript:
This was fun! An hour or so of concentrated investigation of a single room, working step by step towards my escape. Reminded me a bit of Fragile Shells, allthough the puzzles are not as challenging. The solutions don’t depend as much on logical or physical puzzle-solving skills, and more on mlethodical searching of the room’s limited collection of objects and computers.
A very nice twist when it was only quite late in the game when I realised the precise circumstances of my predicament.
“The BDB Project” is short for “The Bonaventura Di Bello Project”. The team consists of Gianluca Girelli (@g0blin) and Garry Francis (@Warrigal). The authors are credited in the game. Type ABOUT for further info regarding the origins of the game.
This first trilogy is a teaser for what’s to come. An announcement regarding the project will come a little later, probably after ParserComp. ‘A Taste of Terror’ is not a Bonaventura Di Bello game, but it is an offshoot from the same project.
This must be one of the best horror pieces I’ve played in a long time.
Unsettling to the bone.
How the word-game draws you in and makes you stay for the slow and ice-cold realisation.
How the gameplay mechanic and the story become entwined tighter and tighter.
How the difficulty ramps up and up while you decode and deduce what happened, and how it then loosens up again to fling you through the endgame into a cold abbyss of understanding.
We control the same protagonist as in Wild West, a few years later. Very similar to the first installment, a linear and rather easy classic parser game. Very cool map and some intruiging NPCs (who turn out to be near-mute when you try to talk to them, except for one or two very specific topics), some fun straightforward puzzles.
For anyone that wants to play Tin Star, make sure you download release 2. Release 1 was an early development version that was uploaded by mistake. This has now been rectified.
Release 2 has lots of bug fixes, some small changes in some of the puzzles and is certainly more robust. See the devlog at itch.io for further details. Oh, and those NPCs respond to a few more topics..