Bit of an unfortunately off-putting name, for a game with a LOT of work put into it!
This has what seems like a custom, browser-based parser and interface; really really impressive, very nice presentation, colored keywords with drop-down menus like Quest. mcT went over a lot of this: https://mctreviews.video.blog/2018/10/21/stupidrpg/, so I won’t repeat things. I agree with what he says about the locale descriptions greying out too quickly. There are some good effects in showing the story, with quest notifications and a “the GM is typing…” in the input field as they describe things to you. It does feel like it sometimes gets stuck there and it wants you press keys to continue, which results in a bunch of gibberish text in the parser field of the random keys I hit, the next time I gained back control.
Yes, there’s a GM, supposedly controlling the little adventure you’re on. The game isn’t particularly serious, and it’s willing to take creative detours (and ones that aren’t at all straightforward to implement), and although they don’t always lead anywhere in the bigger scheme of things, this made it generally easy for me to want to keep going. The game ends up being pretty long, especially since it doesn’t seem to have a save feature. The map in the first area was confusing enough that even though I wandered around there for quite a while, stuck on the 2nd quest (before giving up and stopping my first playthrough attempt), I never really got my bearings. Other areas are much more clearly constructed.
I consulted the walkthrough to get past that quest the next time I started it up, and checked for clues a couple more times to get to the end, once or twice because I wasn’t clear on what to do. Also one or two NPCs weren’t listed in the rooms they were in, but I could figure out they were there because I’d just talked to them.
Places where I got stuck or just got a bit confused:
[spoiler]- the feeder (why in there?)
- how to interact with the cask
- never returned to that pier woman (anyone out there that did?)
- thought I’d have to put the helmet back on the skeleton, but couldn’t?
- the pit doesn’t mention the leader in the location
- use of snowglobe (skimmed the diary too quickly)
- why hug? Is that mentioned anywhere?
- the twins aren’t listed in the rooms they’re in I don’t think
- what was with the sword???[/spoiler]
There’s a part in act one after you wake up from an interlude, before you enter a crescent door, where the plot sort of dropped out for a bit; it didn’t address the fairly big occurrence that happened just before it, and I didn’t have any sort of immediate objective anymore. That part’s also where pretty much the brunt of the puzzles are in the game, so it’s also where I spent a decent amount of time, obliquely figuring I’d need to get past the big mysterious door but not knowing why, doing puzzles just because they were there to do and not because I knew what would happen, and even though the puzzles ended up pretty decently constructed overall here, maybe needing a few tweaks to make them easier (for me at least), I was a bit distracted wanting to know what was happening.
It almost feels like this was made up as it went along, indulging in every passing fancy the author had, in a way where you’d never expect the game to get finished, but then here it is! The result is a game with a lot of bouts of energy, which tries a lot of different things, and which also doesn’t necessarily have the conventional ramp-up of a parser game, in mechanics, in puzzle difficulty, or in plot progression. And it comes in a parser engine that was very cool, and showed off a lot of neat features.
