You Find Yourself in a Room.

You Find Yourself in a Room explores the concept of text adventure as a mode of abuse. The parser is sinister and overtly hateful. It tells you that it doesn't always understand you because it "likes making you guess." It places you in testing rooms and then mocks you for having trouble, in a way that's vaguely reminiscent of Portal's GLaDOS. The puzzles themselves start very simple and grow progressively more laborious, though they mostly stick to very standard tropes of escape-the-room games, with a lot of hunting for keys or codes.

This may not sound like an especially enjoyable concept, but it does actually work pretty well, for a couple of reasons. First, the scope of action is so tightly confined that it's impossible to get distracted by red herrings. Second, there's no time-wasting. The parser's jeering provides some hints and guidance, and also makes your fumbling part of the story. I at least found that I always figured out how to move on to the next room just before losing faith in the game's fairness.

It's short (I think it took me all of five minutes), and I'm not sure I would call it either fun or deep, but it does an excellent job of what it sets out to do.

You Find Yourself in a Room is short, simple, tedious at points, and yet oddly compelling. The parser is a bit on the clunky side, but it's sufficient for this game's needs.

(Spoiler - click to show)The game is somewhat "meta" in that you, the player, are not assuming the role of the person trapped in the room, but of someone sitting at a keyboard interacting with a text adventure created by, for lack of a more appropriate label, the game's antagonist. You Find Yourself in a Room is billed as a "sister game" to the author's previous Viricide, which makes brief mention of an AI that went insane and started tormenting its users through text adventure games - this is one of those games, and after you've solved a few puzzles, the AI will make his presence known and spend the rest of the game taunting you, never passing up an opportunity to remind you of your "human" frailties and how you could never surpass one as "eternal" as him. He's just petty enough overall that the general effect is to push you forward, simply for the opportunity to shut him up, and you finally get to do so in epic fashion.

Again, You Wake Up in a Room is not for everyone: it's not an epic quest or a thoughtful study, but a competently-assembled timewaster that builds up towards a satisfying payoff.

This is not a traditional text adventure, in any sense. It consists, basically, of you going about, solving puzzles, as (Spoiler - click to show)the parser itself starts to reveal how much it hates you. Trust me when I say that while that idea sounds stupid on paper, it's executed well and works fine.

Gameplay wise, this isn't too fancy. You have a few simple puzzles before the game starts revealing the twist. Then there's a very annoying section where you have to (Spoiler - click to show)guess a number between 1 and 10,000. Solvable, but tedious. Especially with the computer spouting the same three insults over and over again. It works with the game's theme, but it isn't really that fun. I guess it's not supposed to be.

Overall, there isn't much gameplay here, but as an experimental subversion of your typical text adventure, it's fine.