The Roads Not Taken by manonamora
This is a curious parser/Twine combo. I admire the author’s bravery for trying to implement a parser in Twine. Though I found it more often than not somewhat frustrating.
For example there’s a point where you are asked your name. Rather than just type that into the entry box you have to type e.g. “name Viv”. Which felt unintuitive.
Equally, common parser abbreviations like n, e, s and w for directions weren’t recognised, and you had to type the full words. And often I would struggle to get the game to respond. Not helped by the screen also often not scrolling down to show me when new text had appeared if I did type something recognised, so there were frequently times when it felt like I’d had no response but I just didn’t always see it before trying other commands.
There is a crucial choice moment where again I was running into a parser brickwall. I tried something different, and got an interesting outcome. Then replayed and managed to get a bit further through the choice, to get another ending. Then tried one last time and got a third ending. But I did not want to replay further. And ran into a bug when I tried to use BACK at the very end to go back to a previous choice.
The underlying story is interesting, intriguing scifi-esque, but I think this game might have been better if written as a more conventional Twine piece. Often I would be repeatedly typing C or CONTINUE to move the story on, which felt like little more than clicking “next” or “continue” in normal Twine. And then when I needed to use the parser I would struggle.
I’m going to add some further notes for the author behind a spoiler section.
spoilers
Typo: “Hint: to get a list of possible action on this screen.” - “actions” would read better
So often I would struggle to interact with names/objects in bold. My first wish was to click on them! But even if I tried typing a verb object combo it often didn’t work.
The separate functions of KEY (list of commands) and HINT (giving a list of verbs) are somewhat confusingly structured
“Loaded” after typing an unrecognised command gets somewhat exasperating.
After the various endings I got I tried to go BACK to the earlier choice. I got this error:
An error has occurred. You may be able to continue, but some parts may not work properly.
Error: <<CountTurns>>: error within widget code (Error: <<replace>>: no elements matched the selector "#load").
Stack Trace:
wikiWithOptions@https://www.springthing.net/2023/play_online/TheRoadsNotTaken/index.html:2795:48334
wiki@https://www.springthing.net/2023/play_online/TheRoadsNotTaken/index.html:2795:48514
@
wikiWrapper@
@
@https://www.springthing.net/2023/play_online/TheRoadsNotTaken/index.html:2795:198711
dispatch@https://www.springthing.net/2023/play_online/TheRoadsNotTaken/index.html:57:43069
And then this appeared on screen:
IF THIS IS NOT THE END PAGE, THERE IS A BUG THERE. PLS CONTACT ME SO I CAN FIX IT!! IF THIS IS THE END PAGE, SORRY I WAS TOO TIRED TO FIX THIS.
I really really wanted to just go back and change the very end, not have to replay through all the earlier bits a fourth time.