There Those Dare Doze

This is a wordplay-based puzzle game, in the tradition of Nord and Bert and Ad Verbum—the sort of thing that really depends on the parser format to work. The world of the game is truly made of words and sentences, not just described by them. I know Andrew Schultz was writing these when I first went on hiatus from the forum, and I’m glad to see he hasn’t stopped.

This one is based on alliterative pairs of words, which have to rhyme with the thing you want to affect. For example (made up, not from this game), you could defend yourself from horrible monsters in a SHIP SHACK by hitting them with the command WHIP WHACK. (Others may be more familiar with this series than I am, because it does seem to be a series, but I’ve never seen it before this ECTOCOMP, so it’s all new to me!)

The puzzles here are fun, and there were some very nice “aha!” moments: getting the ammunition felt great. The big issue with this game is one that might not be avoidable in a Petite Mort—the unrecognized commands.

There are just so many possible alliterative rhymes. And with only four hours to implement, the majority of them aren’t recognized. This means the pacing frequently gets ruined by a long span of perfectly good commands that the game doesn’t understand. There’s no in-game reason why SHARE SHOWS and TEAR TOES aren’t valid rhymes for RARE ROWS, except that there wasn’t time to implement them all. (I’m especially disappointed about FAVE FOUND and SPAM SPEAK. Those felt like they should even fit the puzzles!)

Like I said, I’m not sure this is something that can really be fixed in a Petite Mort. The number of puzzles is very good. I just wish I didn’t keep losing my momentum.

This is the the first Petite Mort game I've played this year (games writtern in 4 hours or less) and the fifth entry in Schultz's series of rhyming pair games. It has less of the glitter of the other games, but has some nice coherence.

You play as someone summoned to aid some ancient beings in a great battle. To help them, you need to gather allies. The map is small, basically a cross shape, with a central area and a room in each of the 4 cardinal directions.

The story here is much more coherent than most of the games in the wordplay series, and it's nice having concrete goals and an honestly cool backstory.

The rhyming pairs are a bit tricky, though, and due to speedy implementation there are a bunch of rhymes that didn't make it in, especially in the main room. I eventually turned to the walkthrough.

The game is not yet polished and because of that I had some trouble with interactivity, but was emotionally impactful and had some fun descriptions. I would play again after more polishing, it was pretty fun.