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Advent Door

by Andrew Plotkin profile

Episode 1 of Advent Door
2020
Fantasy
Inform 7

(based on 16 ratings)
3 reviews26 members have played this game. It's on 30 wishlists.

About the Story

Where’s that door?

This game was written for a collaborative 2019 Advent Calendar project. The theme was "The City of Doors" from the Planescape roleplaying setting. That project was never completed, so I released this game by itself.

Ratings and Reviews

5 star:
(3)
4 star:
(8)
3 star:
(5)
2 star:
(0)
1 star:
(0)
Average Rating: based on 16 ratings
Number of Reviews Written by IFDB Members: 3
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
A brief, fun puzzle, March 29, 2020*

This game is a small, well-executed puzzle that includes enough atmosphere and hints at backstory to keep things entertaining.

The presentation is excellent — the player must use an unconventional mechanic to navigate through locations in the game, but the parser clearly indicates when the puzzle's rules are blocking the player from attempting something. When the player does attempt a move that's allowed, the parser is very generous about understanding actions without getting too fussy about procedures.

(Spoiler - click to show)The process of opening doors, closing doors, taking doors, and placing doors was much more streamlined than I expected. I ended up typing out a lot of extra commands before I realized that some of the actions didn't need to be explicitly spelled out.

* This review was last edited on March 30, 2020
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
A very fun little puzzler, December 13, 2023

I don't have much more to say than what's in the title--this was a quick game with a clever mechanic that required mapping and doing some careful thinking to figure out how to achieve what I needed, and it was very satisfying when I succeeded! The bits of worldbuilding and descriptions keep it from being too abstract. A nice way to spend a half hour.

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A perfect puzzle, April 7, 2020

This parser game is primarily a well-designed puzzle, which intrinsic upsides and downsides. The upsides : the gameplay is really easy to master, and the way to escape is a tricky one (hint : (Spoiler - click to show) to convert a east door in a west one, you must leave it on the garden wall and pick it up by the other side). The downsides : it's just a (good) game, which offers only the pleasure to map an unknown place (like one can do reading a CYOA book).
For the curious (for instance these who wants to program in Inform) or the cheaters (but it only help them to map the place, nothing more), the author left the codesource on his website

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Game Details

Advent Door on IFDB

Recommended Lists

Advent Door appears in the following Recommended Lists:

My new walkthroughs for July 2020 by David Welbourn
On Tuesday July 28, 2020, I published new walkthroughs for the games and stories listed below! Some of these were paid for by my wonderful patrons at Patreon. Please consider supporting me to make even more new walkthroughs for works of...

Polls

The following polls include votes for Advent Door:

Big, impossible houses by OverThinking
Think "House of Leaves" or Aaron Reed's "Subcutanean." "Delightful Wallpaper" doesn't count as, though its map is large and complex, it does make geometric sense.

For your consideration: XYZZY-eligible Best Individual Puzzle of 2020 by Sobol
This is for suggesting games released in 2020 which you think might be worth considering for Best Individual PUzzle in the XYZZY awards. This is not a zeroth-round nomination. This is not an official list. The point of poll is partly to...

Best parser games since 2017 by Rovarsson
When browsing for good recent games, I'm overwhelmed by the amount of Twine and Choice games. Add to that a great number of games with five stars and only one rating, many of which are also, yes, Twine and Choice games, it gets difficult...

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This is version 7 of this page, edited by Tabitha on 25 December 2023 at 11:02pm. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item - Delete This Page