Last House on the Block by Jason Olson
Last House on the Block is a parser puzzle game in which you’re a kid exploring an old house that may contain treasure. It is decidedly light on implementation. Many objects have no descriptions; although you carry a phone the game doesn’t understand the verb “call” or “phone”; your friend doesn’t respond to any of the normal conversation commands. I also never got a very good sense of the setting. For instance, when we see a series of photographs, they are of the most commonplace kind: a marriage, a guy hugging a dog, a guy showing off his child. This seemed like a missed opportunity.
More seriously, the game is plagued with smaller and larger problems of coding and writing. I had to look at the walkthrough to find out that there is a basement in the house. How had I missed that? Well, when you enter the kitchen, you get a special ‘first time’ room description that does not mention the stairs going down. It is only when you then type “look” (but why would you?) that they are mentioned. In fact, it happens more often that certain objects are revealed only by an additional “look”.
Another instance is the attic. Here, I was unable to interact with any objects because it was supposedly pitch dark. But it wasn’t pitch dark: I had two light sources on, and I had room descriptions. Turning the light sources off would correctly give the message that “it is now pitch dark”, and turning them on again would reveal the room description again… but interacting with any objects remained impossible. Since this made finishing the game impossible, I never saw the end.
There are other small problems, such as the ability to pick up the medicine cabinet (which I’m pretty sure was not intended), many instances of incorrect punctuation, and some actions that only show a blank response. More testing was clearly needed.
I’m afraid that at this point Last House on the Block has neither the polish nor the substance to make playing it an engaging experience.