Fenrir 13

The setting may be a bit overused, but since I hadn't already played a lot of games like this it felt fresh enough for me.

The game runs in a single terminal window, no status line, just input and output with some colored text. The custom parser worked surprisingly well for me, being a native speaker that is.

The game gives pretty detailed descriptions about the environment, maybe slightly too detailed sometimes but overall well written and interesting, even though most items are pretty much what you'd expect on a space freighter.

Atmosphere, balance and flow are just fine, not too many rooms and not too many items, and the puzzles are not too hard. The (Spoiler - click to show)weight limit was slightly cumbersome, especially since you have to (Spoiler - click to show)take off all gear to carry the bar, but that was pretty much the only minor annoyance I found.

Would gladly play a sequel!

This game is custom-written in C++, and has you wake up on a ship that is malfunctioning. You have to figure out what's wrong with the ship and repair it.

Pros: The game has lush and vivid descriptions, and has an interesting environment with generally logical and often physics-based puzzles.

Drawbacks: The implementation of some synonyms and nouns is lacking somewhat. As a non-native speaker, I often just put the wrong words in, but I frequently found commands that worked in other German games didn't work here (like 'hinab'). Furthermore, when I was super lost, I discovered the code was public, including some test walkthroughs, and in those test playthroughs the testers tried the exact same things I did, which means the author was aware of the problems and either could not or chose to fix them, leaving the implementation a bit choppy.

A problem for non-native speakers like me (not factored into the score) is that there are a ton of non-useful items cluttering up each room, with a single useful item in most rooms. So you might have an exercise room with a cardio machine, stationary bike, weights, etc. each with a long paragraph worth of description, but only one of them has anything useful on it. So I found this quite difficult to play, whereas a native speaker would have a much easier time. It made me think about how my English games could be improved for non-native speakers.