Victor's IF Comp 2024 reviews

Where Nothing is Ever Named by Sobol

An extremely short puzzle game, at least in terms of moves needed and objects implemented – perhaps not so much in terms of time needed to solve it. The basic conceit is that the objects in the room you’re in are not named; you have to find out what they are by interacting with them. I’m fairly certain that I’ve seen this before in a more traditional text adventure when you find yourself in darkness, but I can’t remember where exactly, so perhaps I’m wrong.

It’s not too hard to get a basic idea of what the objects are, and after a fairly short time I was sitting on other thing with something in my hands and the thought of making other thing move. But I got completely stuck on the right command. ‘go’, ‘push other thing’, ‘hit other thing’, ‘press heels’, none of that worked. I needed the walkthrough to tell me to ‘ride’. A bit of an anticlimax, naturally.

There’s different endings depending on whether you take the cat, which is a nice touch.

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