Dessert Island Adventure

This game is, I believe, written in a custom parser that the author has used in other games. It works well here, with elegant javascript integration.

You play as an adventurer/junior magician gathering spell ingredients for you boss. The spell ingredients are all food items.

The map is laid out visually, making navigation simple. Areas vary in complexity from mostly-empty to containing multi-level structures with puzzles in each level.

The primary puzzle-solving technique is inspired by The Wand by Arthur DiBianca. You say a magic spell in your grimoire, and point your wand at something for that spell to take effect. The spell language follows patterns that you have to discover.

I haven't completely finished the game, finding only a little more than half of the ingredients on my own and 4 more with hints, but the game lets you stop at any point, and I've gotten up to an E for Exceeds Expectations.

The puzzles are rich and interesting and systematic, and vary from trivial to complex. I didn't connect on an emotional level, more just skimming the surface, but that's more due to personal taste. Overall, well-done and enjoyable.

A simple Enchanter-like magic casting adventure on an empty desert island (or dessert island, as this is a place of gingerbread cottages, cream lakes and battenburg mountains). Uses a custom parser system that works well, and presents a nice map on the right on the screen (that fills as you explore) with rich text on the left. Provides a little world-building through letters and newspaper articles scattered around. If you're not Dutch/Flemish you'll need to look up what a "smoutebol" is. A lot of fun, unfortunately it lacks any online hints, and it's pretty damn hard to boot so I didn't get very far by myself (7/16 points). On the itch.io page you can find "Slacker Sam's guide to an easy B" - but it still only gets you up to 9/16 points.

This game is a remarkable achievement, full of cleverly devious (or deviously clever?) little puzzles that are suitable for both kids and grown-ups. The fact that it's written in a custom system that seems every bit as full-featured as any of the major parser systems (like Inform 7, TADS or Dialog) is just icing on the cake.

The simple premise of an apprentice's fetch quest in a land of sweets really undersells the difficulty level of this game. I tried it by myself and never got more than 12 out of 16. When I suggested it to my play group, everyone was quickly hooked by the game's central premise of a decomposable/recombinable set of magical wordlets and had a blast working out all of the ways that they could be exploited.

The fact that there is no checklist of items to gather means that finding all sixteen will require some lateral thinking; part of the puzzle structure is figuring out what things might be convertible into the special ingredients that you've been sent to find. The very British-style approach to descriptions of locations and items means that, though the information provided is sparse, almost every bit of it is relevant in some way or another.

My playgroup was able to obtain all 16 points in the course of a two-hour session, with only a few nudges from me based on previous experience. In a few places there are hints of guess-the-verb in that one must intuit that a particular action can be applied to objects, but with multiple people playing it was never very long before one of us came up with the right idea. The biggest headslapper from my perspective was discovery of two magical ingredients (both flans) in an unexpected location -- it's a bit of a joke on experienced players, but the game was quite fair about this in its hinting. (Spoiler - click to show)In the cottage, there's a remark about desk drawers that you shouldn't forget!

This is a great game for introducing newcomers to parser IF, and well worth the time for anyone looking for some fun with a neat magic system remniscent of Suveh Nux. My hat is off to author Nils Fagerburg, whose impressive talents are on display here.