The Whale's Keeper

Somehow I missed playing this game in IFComp which I'm surprised about as the game's premise immediately caught my attention when I saw it on the IFDB list.

It's interesting and the writing is overall good although it feels like it could have leaned a bit more into describing the atmosphere like the disorientation or horror of being trapped in the belly of a whale with all sorts of weird stuff going on. The constant sanity meter is ok, but sometimes feels like it's trying to do the lifting that perhaps the text should be doing more of to make you feel as the author seems to want conveyed.

I actually do like the concept of a game that requires text entry giving you the possible commands, essentially turning it more into a "choice based" game, and it can be friendly to new players who may be unsure what commands to use, although the platform doesn't feel like it is parser either. There are perhaps a few too many one option choices in there where there could have been more even just to reflect how the player is feeling about doing something I feel, perhaps adding some flavour text with two options instead of one might help with this?

Unfortunately I don't think the chat style really suits the type of game it is though and feels like it may have worked better in something like twine or ink. The chat bubbles just feel a bit jarring for me against the concept of being trapped in a whale, and I personally dislike delayed text as it causes unnecessary delays in progressing through the game. As I often do with games that have long delays in displaying text, I find myself getting distracted and leaving the page to let it do it's thing, then coming back when its finished loading as I would get frustrated waiting which affects the atmosphere of the gameplay and makes it feel unnecessarily dragged out and I lost connection with the story. I couldn't find any way to click through the waits. These sorts of chat style games I feel seem to work best when it is a believable premise like people using their phones or computers to communicate through the game (and even then, the delays can be an annoyance if they cannot be bypassed.)

I believe this is a debut game from this author though, which makes it a really good first effort and worth playing.