Reviews by vegetablegarden

This game had quite a few rough edges where it was clear the author was relatively unfamiliar with Inform and with parser games in general. Many key mechanics were implemented in decidedly nonstandard ways (ignoring features of Inform that might have made them smoother, and default commands that might conflict).

That being said, the game structure was interesting, and while the game uses a lot of elements from older, crueler games like mapping, limited moves, etc. (I presume many of these elements were topics of study in the class mentioned in the credits), none of them outstay their welcome. In fact, my favorite part of the game was the move-limited conversation tree in one of the paths. To my memory, it's the only conversation implementation I've ever seen that has actually managed to make me feel like I had to choose what topics to bring up carefully and really consider how they might specifically further my goals, without ever feeling betrayed if an option didn't quite go where I thought it would. The move limits curbed my natural impulse to lawnmower, while still leaving as many choices open to the player as possible, and being flexible enough to allow a couple tangents before returning to the main topic, which felt like a very natural way to hold a conversation. I was also very impressed that I was able to correctly figure out which conversation topics would lead to the correct outcome on my first try, without feeling like my hand was being held or they were being pointed out in any special way; the conversation felt logical and intuitive, which in my experience is extremely difficult to achieve and very uncommon to find.

I did find the plot and lore a little hard to follow in places. I think some of this was a pacing issue, especially going between combat and the lore/exposition paragraphs after combat. (A couple well-utilized "press space to continue" bits might have worked well there.) But overall I enjoyed the game and found the mechanics fun and interesting.

Not fully satisfying as a standalone game or story (which is to be expected), but fairly good for what it is, which is a short puzzle with one mechanic.

It has a very thin layer of fiction added on top for flavor, but it's really the text-game version of one of those simple tactile puzzles that requires you to move things around in a specific order to solve — remove all the screws! Slide the blocks around in the correct order to form an image! This is a type of puzzle which has become ubiquitous in a mobile game format. I found myself wanting it to have more "levels".

This game was well-served by its map-based nature, as I quite enjoyed having to map the puzzle out myself. I think that this is the main thing that the text-based format added to the puzzle experience.

I'm giving it 3/5 stars, but my main problem with it is that I wanted there to be more of it!