A Warm Reception

Seeing this game gave me trepidation. Marked 'an hour and a half', parser game, 'Old School', 'Excellent for new players and veterans of the genre', a classic-looking castle on the cover; it had all the markings of some custom-parser windows executable game that is huge and buggy and the author keeps insisting 'The game is easy' or 'You're playing wrong', as has happened in countless past IFComps.

Imagine my relief when:

* The first sentence made me laugh, and
* the game turned out to be fair, well-programmed, and have an adjustable play length.

In this game, you are a reporter assigned to cover a royal wedding. You arrive late (intentionally) to find everyone gone and the castle unusually hot.

This game lets you access the end from the beginning! At any point you can enter the final battle, with a random chance to win based on your overall score. So the game only really lasts as long as you want it.

Gameplay is pretty simple, mostly 'pick up item and use it here'. There are some more complex puzzles; there was one maze I solved halfway but gave up on just because I don't really like mazes. Once I saw the spoilery map, I realized that it wasn't even hard, but such is the fate of weak walkthrough users like myself. The only other hard puzzle was one that I had seen others talking about on here so I knew how to solve.

There were several unimplemented interactions and synonyms.

Overall, the interactions were satisfying and the writing funny. Something felt a bit 'light' about the game, both in puzzles and writing, but what is here seemed good. I do think I ran into a bug or unusual luck, because I was able to beat a luck-based game without rigging it the way the game suggested.