Clickbait

You've been informed about a photography contest.

A contest where participants explore abandoned buildings to photograph "something never meant to be seen." Sounds like your idea of fun. Following a map found on Reddit, you sneak into an abandoned underground train station in hopes of finding the perfect shot.

Gameplay
Gameplay involves exploring the station, including a non-moving train. The player is armed with a camera that can take 10 photos, all of which will be submitted to the contest and determine your score at the end of the game. You meet characters along the way and open doors that you’re not meant to open.

Implementation needs work, especially with guess-the-verb challenges that stand in the way of solving otherwise easy puzzles. This occurs primarily with using the key cards to unlock doors and combining the carabiner with the rope.

Overall, there are rough areas that could be smoothed out. For instance, the game never acknowledges the backpack it claims you have:

>take carabiner
Carabiners have many uses besides rock climbing. You toss it in your backpack.

>x backpack
You can't see any such thing.

It's also possible to pick up the vending machine.

You are carrying:
a vending machine (closed)

Nonetheless, I did enjoy the puzzles and the colour-coded tunnels. There are several get-past-the-locked-door puzzles, but they are fairly self-explanatory. I also like how there are two ways of (Spoiler - click to show)bypassing the door that leads to the green tunnel.

Story/Characters
I was initially frustrated by the characters because the game seems to shoehorn the player's actions with them. There's a lot of "maybe you should do such and such first before [your desired action]" which can strip the gameplay of its dimension.

>x key card
A small dark blue card, about the size of a credit card. It appears to be significantly worn from years of riding around in the officer's uniform.

>take it
You feel like you'd better ask about the card first. It's the polite thing to do.

Only for us to lull the officer to sleep so we can steal it. Not so polite, after all.

Plus, characters’ behavior did not seem entirely rational- suspiciously tailored to the player’s task. In fact, you can skip the Lily puzzle if you already know about (Spoiler - click to show)Barry. She has no other stake in the game.

(Also: Rat Man was fun. 'RATTY' Ralph from Gerbil Riot of '67 came to mind when I saw him.)

Final thoughts
Clickbait has a strong overarching premise and builds on the appeal of sneaking into places we’re not supposed to be. The protagonist is clearly psyched to win the competition, and this enthusiasm is conveyed in the gameplay. That said, the quality is hindered by rough implementation, largely with guess-the-verb.

It’s not a seamless game, but the author seems to have put a lot of thought and care into its creation. It doesn’t take long play, and the twist at the end gives it greater depth than what appears on the surface.

I was excited to add this game to my list of surreal games on trains, an oddly specific genre that pops up in all years and among all platforms.

In this parser game, you enter some abandoned train tunnels and an abandoned train. You are tasked with taking photos of 'something that wasn't meant to be seen'; at the end of the game, you're scored on your photos.

Gameplay is a combination of escape-room style gameplay and bizarre NPCs. There's the creepy little girl Lily who's just chilling in an abandoned train that you just unsealed the door to, and the Crazy Rat Man (I'll let you guess what he's like). Puzzles include things like color-coded keycards and buttons, items like crowbars and rope, and the extensive use of your camera for both information gathering (the author came up with some creative ideas in this vein) and for scoring points.

The whole game is linear, not in puzzles, but in outline; all the rooms run east-to-west with occasional up or down moves.

Parser implementation is mostly good; it looks to me to be the level of someone who is intelligent and talented but doesn't have a ton of experience yet. The five testers listed surely contribute to the state of the game (which didn't have any major bugs that I found), but there could be more synonyms and more use of Inform's special tricks. For the synonyms, I'd recommend the author read the automatic transcripts IFComp makes and look for times people got error messages, and try implementing any reasonable commands that they tried (if they plan on a post-comp update). For the special tricks of Inform, I'd incorporate more special messages for objects that you find. Objects are often listed in the text and then again at the end in a 'you can see , __, and here'. This can be fixed by either making the object scenery, putting the object's name in brackets (like "There is a [shelf] on the wall") or by saying 'The initial description of the shelf is ""', or something like that.

This was fun. The twist at the end did explain a lot of things. I think the game overall is one I would consider a 'success' as an author and one I enjoyed playing.

If you were to make a checklist of mistakes first-time parser authors often make, Clickbait would run afoul of a bunch of them. The first puzzle announces its solution in an annoying every-turn rule that spams you with the exact same text every time you do anything, even taking inventory; dialogue uses the ASK X ABOUT Y syntax, with the available topics explicitly listed, but if you mistype or shorten them slightly (e.g. asking about “picture” rather than “his picture”) the command won’t be accepted; there’s a lot of unimplemented scenery, and device-fiddling puzzles made frustrating by the fact that you can’t just type TURN ON BLUE to push the blue button, because you’ll get asked to disambiguate between the button and a blue keycard you’re carrying (plus that won’t work because despite the button’s description noting whether it’s switched on or switched off, TURN ON/OFF actually don’t work and you need to PUSH the button instead); and a couple of puzzles even employ the dreaded USE X ON Y syntax.

But! The good news is that definitionally, an author can only be a first-timer once – and most of these irritants are pretty easy to fix for subsequent games. And the better news about Clickbait, specifically, is that it’s got a lot of high points that make me look forward to playing a second and third and fourth game by the author. The conceit here is fun: an urban-exploration photography contest prompts you to check out a long-sealed-off subway station, and when the door accidentally locks behind you, you need to find your way out while still making time for some winning snaps along the way. Most of what you get up to is relatively standard stuff – again, there are keycards, plus a rope, a lost toy you need to retrieve for a little girl – but the generally modest difficulty and pleasant, pacey writing keeps things zippy. Similarly, the characters are out of central casting but are nonetheless appealing: there’s a cop too lazy to be any help, a seemingly-incoherent derelict who gives you a vital clue, the aforementioned moppet who’s lost her bunny.

Alongside the sometimes-zany puzzles, the station is actually sketched out in a reasonably grounded way, with realistic detritus, graffiti, and other points of interest that make it feel like more than just an artificial funhouse to poke around in. And while the game isn’t laugh-out-loud funny, more than a few moments raised a smile, none more so than the reason the station was abandoned in the first place (Spoiler - click to show)(I’m not talking about the “it was all an experiment thing”, I can take or leave that twist, but the metal-can-of-tuna-in-the-microwave gag alternately makes me giggle and blanch).

Clickbait also gets more ambitious than the typical parser debut by having a robustly-implemented camera. You only have a limited number of shots, and you can photograph just about anything you choose; there are a few places where you’re prompted to take a picture to reveal a clue that for whatever reason isn’t visible to the naked eye, but for the most part, you can let the spirit guide you. I had a taste for portraits and urban-decay pictures of graffiti, but it feels like there’s a reasonable amount of room for player expression (now I’m wondering about doing a series on the color-coded doors). While your choice of candids can’t lead you to fail the game, the ending does evaluate your pics, spitting out a customized blurb for each and scoring you based on how well you realized the contest’s theme. It’s a fun way of giving the player more agency while navigating the often-linear process of solving text adventure puzzles, so I’m all for the experiment.

So given the promise on display, it would be churlish to harp on some of the rough edges in Clickbait’s implementation – I’m attaching my transcript since I do think it’s worth figuring out how to smooth them out for next time, but I very much hope there’ll be a next time.