Ratings and Reviews by Wade Clarke

The Clock Tower is a short and amusing parser game with dynamic audio, created in eleven days for a Lisp (programming language family) game jam. A point of interest is that the parser itself was written from scratch in this time. It's a bare bones one by modern standards, and with a strange advice message for unrecognised nouns which usually quotes only a first letter, but these things don't matter because this is a small adventure which doesn't need an advanced parser.

The PC lives in a clock tower and finds themselves standing beneath a locked trap door when the game begins. Their downstairs neighbour, who also lives in the tower(?!) appears to be out. The game doesn't state the PC's goals leading to the win condition but that locked trapdoor is right there, and there's also a small outdoor area to explore.

The highlight is the dynamic audio. There are ticking clocks, the sounds of nature, and the bongs from the clock tower every now and then, all of which fade in and out appropriately or on a location by location basis. This isn't complex but it is a reminder most parser games don't experiment with it. The star of the audio is a tuneable three-station radio, complete with original audio loops and fake ads. The radio features in a puzzle which is also solvable if you don't use the audio.

The game implies a strange sort of world where folks live in clock towers and chill out listening to old school radio while taking care of their cats. No questions, no explanations, that's just how it is. It all fits together comfortably for a game written from the ground up within a time limit.

(This is an edited version of a review originally published in my blog during IFComp 2025.)

Not so Happy Easter 2025 (NSHE) is a humourous, light horror adventure written by Petr Kain in the Czech language for the ZX Spectrum. The author's translation of it to English debuted in IFComp 2025 and I found it to be compelling, well designed and a lot of fun.

I dig retro-platformed IF that is set in the present day, and NSHE offers the anachronistic delights of cell phones, Teslas and QR codes rendered via technology which predates their existence. It also has some contemporary design sensibilities such as an absence of random deaths or "walking dead" situations. As an Australian, the game was culturally interesting to me with its local slang, Czech currency and other European touches.

• Play Tip: In this engine, L is not short for LOOK but for LOAD, which will fastload a fastsaved game! To LOOK, either type LOOK in full, or R (for REDESCRIBE).

The blurb is a good one:

"You invented a simple adventure game for the kids in the town, where they had to solve simple puzzles and look for chocolate eggs. They solved nothing, they found nothing, and three of them got lost somewhere."

I like that second line conveying the mildly exasperated cynicism of the PC voice. The good thing is that that voice doesn't become overly cynical during play. 8-bit games of the day could be snarky at the expense of the game's narrative or atmosphere, and still can be if they emulate that tone, but I found NSHE to be sitting in a good spot. My own feeling of achievement in solving its seventy-five points worth of puzzles was not undermined by cheap one-liners. Those puzzles involve the PC's search for the missing kids with the goal of avoiding being drubbed by angry parents. There are a handful of F-bombs dropped and some described violence, but contextually there's not much of it and no gratuitousness.

The game starts in a town, and with this section being more open than what comes later, it's potentially a little more difficult, or at least less aimed. I found the key to success is to continue to make your rounds. The environment is mildly dynamic (e.g. there's a bus stop, and a bus that doesn't come immediately, and NPCs who come or go in response to events) but this is a game where repeat visits to locations and the retrying of actions over time can pay off. Once you've clocked this, the fact that the roster of locations isn't too big works for you, as does the limited verb set. The game gives a complete list of verbs if you ask for VOCAB, anything that can't be expressed with a more specific verb can be effected with USE A, or USE A ON B. There's lots of technical help, too, in the form of colour-coded feedback and the marking of interactive props with inverse text. Such features help prevent the wasting commands on things that aren't implemented.

The post-town adventure which takes place in spookier wilderness is where the game gets denser. This is well-performed classic adventure gaming with lots to do in a small number of locations, some back-and-forthing and the potential for new ideas and uses for such diverse items as an electric bike or a rubber duck to pop into the player's head. I finished with a score of 71/75, interpreting a few actions I performed as gaining bonus points, so there must have been some more that I missed. You can check your SCORE at any time en route.

Overall, Not so Happy Easter 2025 is a solid and solidly 8-bit adventure touching with humour on the tropes of modern life, still managing to exercise a bit of a PC voice and attitude through terse-leaning writing, and which does what it can technically to smooth play.

(This review is an edited version of one originally posted to my blog during IFComp 2025)

Willy's Manor is a good-natured puzzling-in-a-house parser adventure, no more and no less. The blurb's concept of the PC being a producer for a TV show called Celebrity Houses is the game-unimportant excuse to subject them to a test organised by novelty-manufacturing eccentric Willy in Willy's extravagant manor. In other words, you enter the manor and solve all the adventure game puzzles inside. Willy has a box which dispenses lightly riddly questions whose answers are objects. Put your object-answer in the box, pull the lever and see if you're right to get the next puzzle. It took me about fort-five minutes to complete the game using the in-game HINT command seven times. There are some typos, it lacks proofreading polish, and sports the odd non-critical bug, but it works.

The character of Willy is built up during play in his absence. There are lots of photos in his house showing moments from his life that either amused him or were important to him. These include shaking hands with the president of the USA and laying out whoopee cushions. Other notes and books and bits and pieces pay out anecdotes about the man. He comes across as a thoroughly nice and quite nostalgic chap, a simpler Willy Wonka without any dark bits. So while it's his house that's supposed to be the subject of the PC's interest, it's really Willy's life that the player seems to be analysing during the course of the puzzling. I don't recall the game specifying Willy's age, but it does all feel like an exercise in looking back in fondness. Ultimately it felt good in its emotion to me, if in danger of being a little cloying on the way.

The game is not technically a limited-parser one but it is one of those that lists all the commands you might need in its HELP section. It doesn't exploit a wide range of actions, sticking to the basics and adding a few custom ones. The in-game graded hints can be called on generally or in relation to specific items, and worked well for me. A couple of times, one of them in the case of a word riddle, I continued to enter HINT until I got the explicit answer.

I'm not sure the manor is as bizarre as the blurb suggests. There's definitely one fantastic section you'd not find in a house, but otherwise it's mostly traditional rooms and halls. It pays to EXAMINE everything. A lot of items don't appear until the PC first notices them. Most puzzles involve you observing the quality of some item and matching it to the riddle answer Willy's box is asking for at the time. A few puzzles in the fantastic section involve more elaborate work, and actually I kicked myself in this area for not being more observant of the environment. I felt I spoiled a good puzzle mechanism with the hints; I blame IFComp haste.

The very last puzzle exasperated me a little as it relies on the player having either a good memory of details of their game, long scrollback that they can review, or a transcript. After wracking my brain I was able to extract from it the needed data. There is a satisfaction in the last room in reviewing Willy's various nostalgic memories, this scene amplifying the overall theme of the game.

Willy's Manor is a little rough-edged and the prose isn't remarkable, but there are lots of puzzles and some good puzzles. The indirect focus on the character of Willy adds an angle to distinguish this arbitrary-puzzling-in-a-house game from the many similar ones out there.

(This review is an edited version of one originally posted to my blog during IFComp 2025)

valley of glass, a lyrical-leaning and extremely short parser game, was the first I chose to play from the IFComp 2025 crop because I liked the blurb. When I say it is extremely short, I mean that it seems incomplete, a stub of an experience. I expect most players will experience it this way.

The blurb opens like this:

"Here you are again, walking the North Road in a rare moment alone before another day of your seven years promised to the village blacksmith."

Playing, it's clear the author was not aware of Inform typicalities. X ME replies "as good-looking as ever" and no exits are listed. Testing the directions, I discovered that a geographical and/or memory-based blockage existed in three of the four main ones, and that they implied puzzles I expected to solve. e.g.

"But until you’ve won your iron shoes from the blacksmith, you’ll never make it past the first few switchbacks."

The southern location was a village. Here, no compass directions worked, so I tried IN. That provoked the end of the game. I had to run the ending a number of times before I got the sense that yes, it could be considered a legitimate ending, as vague as it was about all things other than that a workday was beginning.

I couldn't locate a blacksmith, forge, shoes, or anyone or anything else, except some jewelled fruits in my inventory, polishable with the cloth I had. My instinct, when stuck in certain kinds of parser game, learned back in the day from Infocom's Wishbringer, is to try squeezing or breaking things I'm holding. BREAK worked here, reducing my jewelled fruits to detritus, but also indicating that this was probably a mistake.

Those are the far extents of the game that I found. They comprise the start of a character who has memories, possessions which add to that character (the clothes), others which are unexplained (the fruit), and a few locations recalling memories. The lyrical bent of these things is something, but there's not really a game here and not enough resolution of what is to convey much else.

(This is an edited version of a review originally published in my blog during IFComp 2025.)

my creation is a short (10 minutes) parser game in which the PC is a dad stuck in bed in a rickety house with his crying baby. You would never guess this from the cover art, a design which will only resonate if you complete the game.

Endlessly crying babies raise human hackles at a primordial level, so the game's temporal depiction of that common experience of shuffling around a room one can't leave while the crying can't be stopped is likely to knife (or knife anew) anyone who tries it, in spite of major implementation gaps. It's clear my creation hasn't had a testing round or received any technical advice, but I commend the author for bringing a story like this to the parser format on their own.

It's important to say there's ultimately more to the game than the screaming baby. If that had been the whole thing, it would be an uninviting ask of players to say the least. It's tough as is. But there is more. I will discuss the more with complete spoilering in the remainder of this review.

The PC's in the bed and the baby's in a nearby basket, crying. Where the geography of the parser model really works for this game is making the bed into the PC's world. For reasons not made clear until the end, the prose indicates the PC is in physical pain and inhibited in movement, so each NORTH, SOUTH etc. drags them, with effort, to another section of the bed. The efforts are described. On the one hand, the idea of thinking about compass directions while moving around a bed is absurd. Obviously we're not meant to be thinking about them, they're just the stock method of movement in a parser game. For a new author to program up some replacement terminology would be a big ask, so in this case, it shows the author working with the strengths of the format, but also the need to bend the format's stock trappings to the game. In prose, it's also effective for the bed world that the game's opening paragraph is written in the third person (the rest of the game is in typical parser second person) offering a bird's eye view of the situation:

"He is lying in his bed, in his bedroom, in his own crooked little house with small windows, single glass, overlooking other crooked houses;"

The cut from this intro text into the "middle of the bed" location, the change of scale and pronoun and person, all act together like a magnifying glass zooming in on the PC's situation, where suddenly one bed seems giant.

The geography of the bed isn't respected in the programming, though. There's a constant mismatch between what's described, what can be acted on, where things are. This doesn't block progress – the game is too small for that – but it does interrupt the spell of the fiction and so reduce its power. One inadvertent side-effect was that I was chuckling at my gauche handling of such props as the baby or the basket, but at the same time I experienced a kind of remote terror in handling them. Like, god, I hope the game won't let me DROP the baby in any bad way.

I was surprised when, having found a copy of the novel Frankenstein near the bed, I typed READ BOOK and was suddenly hit with an almost 700-word excerpt. This moment broke the dirge of the baby situation and made me re-engage afresh. I also admit that my kneejerk reaction to the idea of reading Frankenstein to a baby was laughter, but I remembered a second later, of course you can read anything to a baby with a chance of soothing the baby. Reading Frankenstein to this baby is the winning move. It leads to another text block, this one almost 800 words, in which the dad monologues to the restful baby.

The monologue drops the details of the story into place. It's not a twist, but narratively it has some of the functions of a twist of a short story. The dad's in pain in bed because he's had gender-changing surgery, but before that he gave birth to the child. The monologue muses on their possible future and their future relationship. It's certainly a breather after the oppression of game-long crying, and the dewy-eyed intimacy of the moment feels real. In the context of what's come before, which gave away little, and only a little bit at a time, 800 words straight up inevitably feels expositional. That's how I/we typically respond to story structures and lengths after we've encountered enough of them. But the monologue doesn't feel expositional in a "nobody would say all this" kind of way, and I think that's more important. It reads authentic and illuminates the sketched character of the dad. The value of Frankenstein is now also apparent, its tale of human creation and unusual birth and an outsider human in an unusual body resonant with the PC's experiences.

I valued my creation more after playing it and after thinking about it than during the playing, at which time the implementation was kicking the atmosphere every few moves. Even implementation can't stop a baby crying baby, though.

I would describe take me to the lakes where all the poets went to die as a linear, emotionally heavy, romantic (in the oldest tradition) semi-animated comic book. In black and white. It draws strongly on comic book aesthetics for its effects and is dynamic about it, pulling reader’s eyes through the word-emphasising visuals and punctuating them with sound effects, all via a simple eight or sixteen-bit look.

The experience opens with the deliberately-vaguely-depicted narrating character looking over a lake at night. Stars twinkle as she relates the finding of the drowned corpse of Elizabeth, a girl who wrote poetry and whom she seems to have been obsessed with. But obsessed with how? Up close, from a distance or in some other way? The speculating prose has a few abstracting moves up its sleeves as it goes on.

As each frame of image and thought-square of monologue appears, the mechanic is to click to continue, however the click has to be placed on the current speech bubble or latest ellipses to register. I found this requirement distracting. The small target moves in almost every frame, often just two centimetres down the screen. I was relieved to learn after playing that it's possible to just hit the space bar instead.

The dynamics of the heroine’s monologue, and also of her later dialogue with Elizabeth’s ghost or echo, are really well executed. For me, the whole was still a little unsatisfying because my taste is that emotion-based stories like this one work with specifics rather than archetypes. This story’s characters and ideas revolve around binaries and twinning; love, hate, free, trapped, creation (writing poetry), destruction (suicide), the narrator, the drowned girl. The name of the eponymous lake (Dioscuri) alludes to the Roman twins Castor and Pollux. And poets, of course, are famous for being suicidal, thought the real situation that created the stereotype - the rise of the romantic tradition and novels like Goethe’s The Sorrows Of Young Werther (1774) - is obviously far more detailed than the content of the lakes. the lakes takes that end point of the concept of romantic suicide as a symbol without complexity. Still, I feel a churl complaining about the arcehtypal style of a story that pretty much declares, through its allusion to the Dioscuri, that it could be about archetypes. It’s short, establishes a clear visual and editing style during its stay, and is an entirely sound construction of its ideas.

Garry Francis's A Taste Of Terror (TOT) is a classically-styled horror text adventure with an exotic provenance. Francis completed it based on translated almost-forty-year-old design notes for an Italian adventure which was to have been released on the cover tape of Viking Magazine issue 12, circa 1987. The magazine was cancelled, the game never completed and the original designer's identity remains unknown; fuller details are available in the game's ABOUT.

I found these details added a pleasing aura of horror timelessness to the experience. These trapdoors and attics, concealing curtains, consultable books, chapels with pews, openable coffins, mystery-concealing locked doors - and your aunt's hairpin - they all could have been in the original game, they're in the new game, and many are staples of horror IF, and some of all IF.

The PC is ten-year-old, judogi-wearing chess champion Sean. He's visiting the farm of his beloved aunt Clarissa for a break from his apparently intense chessing life. The game begins with Sean waking up to find his aunt missing and his back hurting. The mystery is wide open, as is the map. On my first play I wandered out into the countryside, my back pain increasing until I dropped dead. The time limit imposed by the initial problem is both suspenseful and helpful, as it gives a range limit and a focus.

With sixty-ish locations, mapping is essential. The game's open style means you'll ultimately need to apprehend most or all of its contents at once to solve the puzzles. As there are several ways to die and an eventual level of physical grisliness (manipulating severed bodyparts) which some might find extreme if it weren't tempered by the chilled and sometimes humourous tone, the game feels dangerous for the player but mostly ranks as Polite on the cruelty scale, occasionally Tough. I'd say it takes a minimum of two hours to complete.

There's a mixture of modern niceties and old-schoolness in the tech. Sean has a respectable inventory limit, and a holdall can be found to increase that, but there are still more items to be found than the player could ever hold at once. The PunyInform engine used to create the game hasn't the space for much automation, so expect to handle a lot of keys and doors manually, to take extra steps off things stood on, etc. The game's contents, however, are precise. They are precisely described, placed, and fit well into a design. There's one barn location with numerous tools, and TOT is the kind of game that will distinguish between the uses for a screwdriver, a pair of pliers and a hammer in a stimulating way while allowing for red herrings.

The story develops in stages with different goals, an interesting design for such an open game. The goals escalate from the mundane to the spectacular via a shock-horror moment which demarcates what might be considered the first act. Yet once you've solved your back pain problem, you have access to almost all the map, except the locked door silos. Story development is controlled by a few major encounters and conversations. The final act is the classic IF puzzle game where you have to find all the parts, identify the puzzles, solve them and win.

There's a tone to the game's writing that's recognisable. It leans more to traditional IF description than to horror, occasionally making a joke at the PC's expense or going glib on the violence. Pared back, it might have read as fairytale, but it sits in the place where practicality has to win. After all, the player is eventually going to be carting around bodyparts to solve puzzles. This particular tone has its own charms, and given the amount of puzzle-solving that has to get done in this game, it's probably the right place. There are definitely some really good shocks and creep-outs, often just by surprise.

I found A Taste of Terror to be thoroughly engrossing. It opens in the tradition of horror stories about kids having to face off with adult levels of mystery and supernatural horror, then becomes a big, enjoyable mapping and puzzle-solving game.