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Review
(This review is an edited version of one originally posted to my blog during IFComp 2025)
valley of glass, a lyrical-leaning and extremely short parser game, was the first I chose to play from the IFComp 2025 crop because I liked the blurb. When I say it is extremely short, I mean that it seems incomplete, a stub of an experience. I expect most players will experience it this way.
The blurb opens like this:
"Here you are again, walking the North Road in a rare moment alone before another day of your seven years promised to the village blacksmith."
Playing, it's clear the author was not aware of Inform typicalities. X ME replies "as good-looking as ever" and no exits are listed. Testing the directions, I discovered that a geographical and/or memory-based blockage existed in three of the four main ones, and that they implied puzzles I expected to solve. e.g.
"But until you’ve won your iron shoes from the blacksmith, you’ll never make it past the first few switchbacks."
The southern location was a village. Here, no compass directions worked, so I tried IN. That provoked the end of the game. I had to run the ending a number of times before I got the sense that yes, it could be considered a legitimate ending, as vague as it was about all things other than that a workday was beginning.
I couldn't locate a blacksmith, forge, shoes, or anyone or anything else, except some jewelled fruits in my inventory, polishable with the cloth I had. My instinct, when stuck in certain kinds of parser game, learned back in the day from Infocom's Wishbringer, is to try squeezing or breaking things I'm holding. BREAK worked here, reducing my jewelled fruits to detritus, but also indicating that this was probably a mistake.
Those are the far extents of the game that I found. They comprise the start of a character who has memories, possessions which add to that character (the clothes), others which are unexplained (the fruit), and a few locations recalling memories. The lyrical bent of these things is something, but there's not really a game here and not enough resolution of what is to convey much else.
