How to Win at Rock Paper Scissors

...I mean that kindly! Most parser comp entries these days are notably "new school" or newer, but How to Win at Rock Paper Scissors is of some other, earlier school which I will not pretend to taxonomize, since our periodizations seem to change constantly.

What I'm trying to say is. How to Win at Rock Paper Scissors is a fun and funny chilled-out get-X-use-X jaunt, with various lock-and-key puzzles that involve some clever lateral thinking and some notably uninteractive NPCs. It's a relaxing style of game, good for a lunch break, rarely seen in the wild these days. Like its 2007 counterparts, HTWARPS is a little unpolished, but it doesn't much affect one's enjoyment, and the clever error messages are of the more amusing kind.

So, nothing hugely substantial, but good fun. I'm glad that such things are still being made.

This game is a good example of how you can take just any idea and polish it up into something fun.

The idea (playing paper rocks scissors with crazy consequences) is interesting, but so many other comp parser games had interesting ideas and just failed. There were parser games where no exits were listed, games where only one synonym out of 20 were implemented, games where the writing was incomprehensible, games with big text dumps.

This game, however, hit up all of the important points for basic player enjoyment: adaptive in-game hints, synonyms implemented, standard responses changed, consistent puzzles, etc.

My personal favorite bit was:

">eat phone
You take a big bite out of your cell phone and chew thoroughly.

Okay, you don't actually do that, because that would be dumb."

The writing was a bit sparse, and the story was minimal, but this game still was fun and placed high. Why? Because those pieces of basic player enjoyment are the most important part of a parser game, I believe.

You are a disgraced high school Rock Paper Scissors champion. It's been a long year, but you are ready to regain your position, with the help of the three RPS Gods.

Rooms are bare, descriptions are blunt, and the setting isn't that interesting. The two core puzzles here are finding your offerings (a rock, a paper, and scissors), and tricking your sacrifices into making RPS signs. That latter puzzle is repeated nine times and makes up the bulk of the gameplay. Talk to someone until they make a sign (such as holding up their hand as a stop motion, or posing for a picture with a V sign), then do the right symbol against it. Then (Spoiler - click to show)they get sucked into a vortex. It was surprising at first, but this is most of the game. The mechanic doesn't get expanded upon and the difficulty stays low throughout, eventually feeling kind of boring.

With all that said, this isn't a bad game, just pretty middle-of-the-road. It'd be worth a try if you want a more low-key game.