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Review
This game is a remarkable achievement, full of cleverly devious (or deviously clever?) little puzzles that are suitable for both kids and grown-ups. The fact that it's written in a custom system that seems every bit as full-featured as any of the major parser systems (like Inform 7, TADS or Dialog) is just icing on the cake.
The simple premise of an apprentice's fetch quest in a land of sweets really undersells the difficulty level of this game. I tried it by myself and never got more than 12 out of 16. When I suggested it to my play group, everyone was quickly hooked by the game's central premise of a decomposable/recombinable set of magical wordlets and had a blast working out all of the ways that they could be exploited.
The fact that there is no checklist of items to gather means that finding all sixteen will require some lateral thinking; part of the puzzle structure is figuring out what things might be convertible into the special ingredients that you've been sent to find. The very British-style approach to descriptions of locations and items means that, though the information provided is sparse, almost every bit of it is relevant in some way or another.
My playgroup was able to obtain all 16 points in the course of a two-hour session, with only a few nudges from me based on previous experience. In a few places there are hints of guess-the-verb in that one must intuit that a particular action can be applied to objects, but with multiple people playing it was never very long before one of us came up with the right idea. The biggest headslapper from my perspective was discovery of two magical ingredients (both flans) in an unexpected location -- it's a bit of a joke on experienced players, but the game was quite fair about this in its hinting. (Spoiler - click to show)In the cottage, there's a remark about desk drawers that you shouldn't forget!
This is a great game for introducing newcomers to parser IF, and well worth the time for anyone looking for some fun with a neat magic system remniscent of Suveh Nux. My hat is off to author Nils Fagerburg, whose impressive talents are on display here.
