Verb Noun Adjective

Holy crap. I know 90s nostalgia is all the rage these days – a trend that I’m not super psyched about in any objective sense, to be honest, but to the extent that it will only fade when it’s replaced by the aughts varietal I guess you’d have to count me in favor – but never on my IF Comp bingo card would I have put the triumphant (?) return to the community of Rybread Celsius. His heyday was a bit before my time (02 was my first Comp), and I’m not sure if he was still rattling around the newsgroups at that point, but his legend definitely persisted: a maybe-troll famous for broken, buggy, sloppy, but sometimes oddly-compellingly-mind-bending games straining against their constraints. And now somehow, he’s returned.

The opening of Verb, Noun, Adjective sure seems of a piece with that reputation: it introduces itself as a thin Zork parody (you’re standing outside a miniature house, with a miniature mailbox, and told that you need to find some treasures without any diegetic motivation or plot to put things in motion), there are numerous typos immediately in evidence, plus confusing dream-logic descriptions (“there’s a regal pull to the south, and a holy one to the north” – unless wait, is “pull” just a typo for “pile”?), the listing of exits is haphazard and best and actively misleading at worst, and of course there are no testers listed.

And that’s just the first impression: as you progress, likely making frequent reference to the walkthrough (which is actually just an incomplete collection of hints, often missing the proper context), you discover that the game has not one but two underexplained and underleveraged key mechanics: first, in keeping with the game’s title, you find a machine that lets you swap some specifically-designated words from their noun form to a verb or adjective homophone, and then apply them to stuff in the world to alter their properties, and then you also discover that there are some items that allow the parser to recognize whole new actions. Either of these ideas are enough to build a robust game around, but in the half or so of the game I saw, they were only used once and then discarded.

Meanwhile, even when you have a sense of what you’re trying to do, the puzzles are often broken (I got the coin from the wishing well without realizing I was supposed to have unlocked the previously-referenced action before being allowed to retrieve it – whatever barrier was intended to prevent that never fired), overly difficult due to implementation issues (there’s a “dead adventurer” I had to search with TAKE ALL because I couldn’t figure out what noun to use to refer to it – turns out it was a “corpse”, a word nowhere else used by the game), have incredibly player-unfriendly constraints (one treasure can only be found if you’re in the right place, with the right item, on turn 127 – the game’s hints and paratext gesture towards justifying this by claiming it’s an optimization puzzle, you know, like in Sugarlawn), or just inadequately clued unless you count the magic book that occasionally spouts a cryptic hint about one of the treasures you’re looking for, which isn’t particularly satisfying.

So yeah, this is an untested first draft of a game with inadequate clueing, obtuse design, plenty of dead ends, and sketchy mechanics.

Also I kind of liked it?

There aren’t really any grounds on which I can justify that feeling: the above critiques are all spot on, and objectively it’s hard to claim that anyone should waste their time with Verb Noun Adjective. But there in fact is something about it that worked for me. Maybe it’s just that given the context I spelled out in that first paragraph, I went into this one with low expectations and no real intention of playing it through to the end: if I had been hell-bent on getting all the treasures down to the last lousy point, I would certainly have been intensely frustrated. But as an illogical congeries of unexpected stuff to poke at as long as it holds your interest, it’s good for an hour or so of fun. Like, there’s a hidden thief who talks exclusively in Victorian criminal slang, with the puzzle being to figure out what the heck he’s saying. There’s a corrupt priest, an overcomplicated washer/dryer (I got as fair as figuring out how to use DIY corn starch to make clothes super stiff), a monkey. Those abortive stabs at unique mechanics are fun when they show up. And the writing is loopily engaging, warts and all – like, here’s that priest:

The priest looks you up and down and sees cradle of sin. He casually mentions he has an indulgence you can buy to wipe that sin away.

Would I like Verb Noun Adjective better if it had been polished, tested, and sanded into something resembling a modern text adventure, rather than a relic of the rough-and-tumble 20th Century? Undoubtedly. But I still enjoyed coming across it in its present form too – maybe I’m not as immune to 90s nostalgia as I thought…