The Clock Tower

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.