The Zen of Kayaking

It had been a very long time since I tried a text adventure solo, as I always had friends or family to play them with. When I first went into Zen of Kayaking, I started playing as myself, a simple office worker off for holiday, being mindful of people's belongings and closing doors after opening them...then I remembered this is an adventure game and began to live out my modern-day klepto dreams.

The puzzles were a bit quite challenging to figure out initially, as I knew what I wanted to do, I just had to figure out the specific bit of parser to make my character do it. The rewards for completing them were worth the bit of trouble however, as the flavor text throughout the game was cheerfully witty, and I enjoyed interacting with all the different folks along the game time.

For me, Zen of Kayaking took maybe 15 or so hours overall, however I was streaming the game at the time and I did have a variety of distractions throughout those streams. It'll probably take the expert texting adventurer half that. At the end, I did turn back into myself, as I felt sad that the game was ending, as it truly did feel like a bit of holiday I was now needing to return to the real world from.

The Zen of Kayaking constantly surprised and delighted me. There are a nice variety of puzzles with a good range of difficulty. Some of them require some creative thinking, or even a glance at the hint book, but the solutions always felt satisfying. The writing is wonderful, and there are a lot of little references that seasoned adventurers will appreciate.

Explore with your kayak and help people along the way. There's a couple of dead-ends but game is very fair about alerting you within a few turns.