Lovely Assistant: Magical Girl by Bitter Karella
I’ve played Bitter Karella’s two previous IF Comp entries, Basilica de Sangre and Poppet. Both involved interesting setting and some nice puzzles, but ultimately made me deeply frustrated as I struggles with the Quest parser. So I was happy to see that Lovely Assistant is written in Inform 7. And while this game is still not completely polished – there are quite some missing synonyms, for instance – I never struggled with its parser. So that’s a big win as far as I’m concerned!
Lovely Assistant casts us in the role of the assistant to a famous magician-cum-superhero, who is spirited away by one of the supervillains, the Skeptical Rationalist. It is up to you to use all the tools of the magician’s trade to solve a series of puzzles and find your boss.
This is a very light-hearted little game, in which the whole setting is over-the-top and the villain’s actions are even over-the-topper. (Using a laser to write a message on the moon! Use operand conditioning to make the doves fly in a pattern! Obviously, the joke is that the Skeptical Rationalist is a magician himself, except that he insist on explaining all of his tricks.) The use of magical gadgets was sometimes rather mundane – as when you use the saw to, well, saw – but one or two of the puzzle solutions are inspired, with my favourite being the scene where you pull unlimited rabbits out of a top hat.
Good fun.