Gardening Simulator

I don't know what possessed me to fire up this little pseudo-game by author Phil Riley, whose better-known works include The Bureau of Strange Happenings and the Galaxy Jones series.

This game is horrible, but know that this is a compliment, because it was produced for a competition in which being horrible was the goal. I found myself annoyed by the various (no doubt 100% intentional) shortcomings, but I had a good laugh after growing my first zapricot and (Spoiler - click to show)finding that eating it just leaves you in the position of having to grow another one, with an ever-present hunger timer waiting to kill off the PC should the player ever stop this infinite cycle.

After telling someone else about the game, I began to realize just how artfully I had been annoyed. The way that the Inform grammar lines have been defined for >DIG (and its converse) are quite funny in that it's actually a little difficult to get the parser to be so painful for the player in this particular way. It's a guess-the-syntax problem transmogrified into a genuine puzzle for someone familiar with the system. (Spoiler - click to show)(And I have to admit that I was stumped enough by the syntax for tamping that I had to resort to a decompiler. It was still delightful because I learned something new about the way the parser's "inference" logic works.)

Wherever the design looks like it might be unintentionally bad, Riley is careful to turn it up to 11 so that you know it's that way on purpose. (Spoiler - click to show)Yes, the descriptionless room named "path" north of the garden is funny. The fact that there are three more on the way to the well is very funny given the fairly tight hunger timer.

I doubt that very many people will share the perspective to really appreciate this convoluted (and involuted) joke of a game, but it's a great joke for those who do. I can't give it a very high score as a game, because -- to repeat -- it's a horrible game by design, but I can't give it a low score, either, out of admiration for the vision to reach such depths. I'll settle on 3 stars in recognition of the author having spotted and hit the target so precisely.