His Majesty's Royal Space Navy Service Handbook

This is a charming game about a very stuffy and uptight woman who’s probably very unpleasant to work with, but who is fun to see the inner thoughts of. The puzzles are relatively simple and logical (though I still needed hints because parsers are difficult for me). I liked how the game had verbs assigned to solutions and removed them you solved things, just to lighten the load; very clever design choice for the limitations of the deadline. Most mentioned things were examinable and that always feels nice. Also bonus cookie for torrid, exciting, daring romance that you only incidentally see through a window while you gather paperwork.

As a short SeedComp game, it wastes NO time trying to do a prologue, backstory, or exposition that’s not directly in the game world-- thus I think this is an excellent example of how to exposit heavy setting details in an efficient way. The incredibly biased views of the protagonist showcase the rigidity and expectations of the society via her very thoughts, and all other worldbuilding is delivered through dialogue, items and tchotchkes, and windows into the not-so-empty vacuum of space.

I did find the author’s notes proselytizing about not using verbs not in the verb list a little annoying.

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