Warrior Poet of Mourdrascus

This is the author's first parser game, but lacks many of the bugs and rough edges that first games tend to have. I don't recall running into any errors during gameplay.

In this game, you're a warrior/poet who is visiting a coastal desert city. You have to sell your camel and find out where your enemy has fled, a professor with something called the mantablasphere.

The game has combat, with different items you can equip. Unlike some recent combat RPG games I've played recently that were extremely difficult with almost no room for error and few opportunities to heal, the combat in this game was fairly mild but still interesting, with a few opponents and multiple opportunities to heal. You can fight with weapons or use poetry to hurt others (this functions as a weapon but with humorous descriptions of the fight).

The world felt really big at first, but once I explored I saw it was manageable. The map accompanying the game helped. A couple of times I got stuck because I did examine room descriptions and people carefully enough.

The game ends before anything super exciting happens. And the world seems a fairly generic representative of fantasy. It varies from goofy (like having food named after tv and movie creatures like the mogwai) to serious (a guard asks you to report crimes for money). Creatures like goblins and elves inhabit the world without any real exploration of what their presence means. An inn is just an inn; a castle just a castle; a merchant is just a merchant; a church is just a reason to have a cemetery; pirates and thieves work together but there's no hint of why or their purpose. Each part of the game locally makes sense and work, but if you step back globally it's hard to see a bigger picture.

Because of the smooth programming, I'm glad I played the game. For the next installment, it would be fun to see more of what makes this world unique.