Ratings and Reviews by Wade Clarke

This is the first of Garry Francis's BDB parser games I've played, though I have played the related (and excellent) A Taste Of Terror.

The Wrath of Anubis treads some of the wellest-worn of adventure game turf, the exploration of an Egyptian tomb. It's solid, but perhaps felt a little short to me, especially in light of the length of the blurb and introduction. The backstory involving Anubis, ancient history, curses and village traditions is (relatively) elaborate, but doesn't really inform the action, or add anything to the goal of finding a single important treasure, except that it casts the quest in a positive light - not one of those bad old lights! The original game is from 1987, a lot closer to the time of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1982) whose tomb-raiding influence on some of the situations is obvious.

The Wrath of Anubis can definitely be commended for delivering accessible versions of traditionally 'Argh!' challenges found in old (read: past forty years as I type this) Egypt-set adventures. Its desert maze is samey and semi-illogical, but still designed to be a doddle compared to the incarnation of this kind of thing found in, say, The Sands of Egypt (1982), or even a non-Egyptian game like Wizard and the Princess (1980). There are oases, a thirst timer, and a checklist demanding you find food, but each of these things is paid off in the least inconvenient way possible. This speaks to one of the BDB Project's stated goals of updating the games for modern players, while obviously retaining that core style of pretty pure text adventuring.

So the game has most of the major features of the tradition, executed well, but perhaps unspectacularly and not at length. I probably expect a lot when it comes to the Egyptian aesthetic nowadays, and Wrath didn't raise my excitement levels enough. It's still a good piece of work.

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

Temptation in the Village is Anssi Räisänen's parser game adaptation of the eponymous unfinished short story by Franz Kafka. That story is dated 1914. Räisänen explains in the game's ABOUT that Temptation begins as a faithful adaptation of the story, then develops via his own expansions on it in the style and spirit of Kafka. The result is the experience of a Kafka tale manoeuvred to suit the parser format. Psychologically focused within the PC, it is atmospheric and works very well. The methods for the adaptation are interesting but uncomplicated, and they drew my attention back to some fundamental qualities of the parser format and their effects. The story is certainly as existential as one expects from Kafka, but it doesn't have the unrelenting heaviness of something like The Trial. Its feet are in naturalism and it's set on a village farm.

The opening paragraph of the game acts as a kind of benchmark. It depicts the PC experiencing what psychologist Abraham Maslow termed "the peak experience", the feeling that life is infinitely interesting and exciting, and potential-filled:

"One summer, as evening falls, you arrive in a village you’ve never been to before. You’re struck by how broad and open the roads are. Tall, old trees stand in front of the farmhouses. It has been raining recently, the air is fresh, everything delights you."

This experience will soon be defused by the PC's dealings with a roster of unhelpful and sometimes unintentionally sinister village characters. In my reading of the game, the elaboration of the move to or away from this psychological high point is the frame for what happens in the story.

I need to preface the rest of this review by saying that at the time I wrote it, I hadn't read any Kafka in full. Being a literary type, I know a lot about Kafka from secondhand reading, the zeitgeist, and the overused adjective "Kafka-esque". My experience of Temptation meshed with specific qualities I expect from Kafka. The game features absurdity and an uncertain prosecutorial atmosphere, and though there are no real bureaucracies in it to confound the PC, the minor hierarchy of the farm's running amounts to a version of one.

The story begins with the PC wandering in the countryside when they come across a farm. Looking for shelter and work, they start to enquire about both, and are soon running afoul of ambiguously helpful/unhelpful locals. A village man suggests the inn might suit, but also points out it's been turned over to a cripple the local community was obliged to provide for. The cripple and his wife can hardly manage the inn, so the inn stinks and ends up providing for nobody. The villager and his wife hang about the dithering PC, following at a distance for no good reason and seeming both menacing and foolish in doing so.

The main way such events are managed in the game is just by allowing or blocking directional movements at different times. The player is forced to twitch and dawdle about the first location, being invited in one direction, finding that way blocked by NPCs or their ideas, invited in another, finding it now blocked too for new narrative reasons. For the most part, these methods get around the need for any conversation mechanic, though there is some ASK SUCH-AND-SUCH ABOUTing required.

The divisions created by parser game turns and locations suit Kafka's and Räisänen's unhelpful NPCs. The prose of Temptation conveys an inner psychological process, not just a series of standalone vignettes about place. The PC enters a room, is often prohibited from performing actions by implied social customs or just the silence of others (how strange it would be to ask an old couple for a room for the night, and find they're prepared to sit at their porridge dinner in the half-dark just ignoring you) and must work out what to do to unstick the situation. The prose indicates a normalcy, or at least non-rudeness, in the PC, which is tested by others who seem to be unthinkingly rude or just not thinking.

Even children have an air of menace in this story. They awaken and encircle the PC in unison when they hear the sound of a dog barking at night:

"It is too late; suddenly, all around you, you see the children rising up in their white nightshirts as though by agreement, as though on command, and eye you closely."

There is a sense of conspiracy amongst others, never verified or verifiable. It just emphasises that the PC is the PC and cannot know others' thoughts, yet he keeps trying to balance what he guesses those thoughts might be against his own standards.

Where Kafka's story ended in the night, Räisänen continues to the morning with the PC's enquiries regarding work. A young man seen earlier on a wall, where he was inviting the PC onto the farm in what modern folk would describe as a passive-aggressive manner, now submits the PC to a pre-work test:

"It would make a great impression on the master if you mowed the tall grass south of the house. There is a scythe in the old barn... Another thing you could do is move the big trunk from the old barn to the new barn."

The PC thinks this man seems like a foreman, and speculates he might even be the son of the old farmer, but chooses not to ask about either of these things. The player's more traditional adventuring skills are now drawn on to bring the farming tasks to a close, at which point the man asks one more thing:

"... remember seeing those fallen cherry blossoms in the garden? You could go and glue them back onto the tree branches. I am sure the master would appreciate that very much."

The PC's realisation that the man has been pranking him and wasting his time is accompanied by another; that the PC himself has been behaving in a blindly obedient manner while on this farm.

Similar incidents sprinkled throughout the game have led to this point. As a player, I recalled my own following of all the suggestions made by those initial villagers outside the farm, in spite of them not actually being helpful. I still didn't realise that the old couple I'd found eating porridge on the first evening had never actually offered me a room until I reviewed my transcript of play. I'd just felt that they had, then gone off and lain down on a pile of straw to sleep. The so-called foreman never indicated who he was, or why he might have had any real authority over me, yet the PC had behaved in a manner as if he had.

Given that this is the conclusion to the fully original portion of the game, and that it weaves together the prior contents of Kafka's short story so well, I think the integration is excellent, and the story has a thematically and psychologically powerful conclusion.

The man's prank isn't the final word, though. Recalling the peak experience of the protagonist in the first scene, that hard-to-share delight he experienced at everything, I'm aware of the distance travelled from that moment to his humiliation at the hands of the foreman. The game has shown that the PC got here by careless small steps in the face of uncertainties, and certainly lost his way after that first moment. Peak experiences can feel like accidents. Abraham Maslow ended up assuming they were. Writer-philosopher Colin Wilson later explored the phenomenon in literature and in reality as something one could try to bring about. Temptation ends with a turn back towards the potential of the opening high point:

"But even in this desolate moment, you know that one day you will find a place that truly belongs to you, no matter what it takes - and it will be somewhere entirely different from here."

For the evolution of the PC, this is obviously the right move. The game casts most of its situations in Kafka's socially adversarial light, so there are practical implications we can take from the story, or be reminded of, about how more assertiveness may be needed in dealing with such situations, and with self-proclaimed authorities, if we aren't to be given the runaround like the PC is in Temptation.

Given my lack of Kafka-reading, I don't know if Kafka ever ended stories with what you might call a positive vector. By his reputation, I doubt it. On the other hand, if he'd trafficked down in Samuel-Beckett-like levels of wilfully stupid pessimism, I'm sure I'd have heard about that.

Temptation in the Village is interactive, but not in the sense that the player could have warded off all those unhelpful people. There's a journey to go on here and the interactions highlight opportunities to think about it. The player is subjected to the old "You can't go that way" message a lot – in situation-specific prose, of course – but that message is existential, not just physical. The PC chooses not to go that way, now. Why? Probably because they're being too careful to try not to offend any of the uncaring NPCs.

What is the Temptation of the title? I have no idea. Some googling suggests there aren't solid ideas out there regarding Kafka's original piece. It was an unfinished fragment, after all. I think some mystery is always a good thing.

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.