Who Kidnapped Mother Goose?

This is a polished parser game entered in the Text Adventure Literacy Jam.

In it, you find that Mother Goose was kidnapped, and you have to save her! On the way, you'll encounter many of the characters from Mother Goose's fairy tales.

Gameplay is classic parser style, with most of gameplay revolving around taking and dropping objects, using objects with clearly-defined uses, and talking with NPCs.

There is an odd feature of the game, where most of the time the use of an object is directly told you ('you should search this', 'you can open it', 'you can PUT IT ON something'), but other times you're merely told what you can not do, often with objects where some use would make sense. For instance, I was stymied when (Spoiler - click to show)the game told me that I needed to hide my smell, and I had (Spoiler - click to show)perfume, but the game only said (Spoiler - click to show)you don't feel like putting on the perfume. I felt like that was pretty frustrating. I found a different item later, but I thought it odd that the game had a clear solution which was just ruled out as a preference. A similar thing happened with (Spoiler - click to show)the need to make a loud sound and (Spoiler - click to show)the gunpowder. While I've spent a long time on this, these frustrations were only a part of the game and the rest was overall smooth.

I enjoyed the writing in general. The characters, while true to the stories, were also more flirtatious and/or violent than many modern adaptations of nursery rhymes, holding more true to the original versions.

Overall, a well-made game.

A game that takes lots of fairytales and nursery rhymes and mashes them up into one very lively village of characters!

A nice solid tutorial means that the player knows how to do things specific to the game that are sometimes considered advanced for beginners, such as SEARCHING and LOOKING UNDER things.

The game is straightforward and relatively linear with nice easy puzzles – exploring everywhere available will get you all the items you need.

There are a few loose ends and red herrings due to the flavour from the exploration, and a few odd barriers (you can’t (Spoiler - click to show)carry water in the mug because (Spoiler - click to show)‘it’s made for carrying ale, not water’), but the endgame is fun and satisfying (though I think it would have been more so if the game hadn’t been quite so explicit about how to solve the last puzzle – it feels like you’re being told the answer outright).

Another fun and enjoyable game at the right level for beginners, and another worthy addition to the ever-growing TALP subgenre.