The Moon Watch

This game is from the same 2008 One-room game competition as Escapade!, a game I enjoyed in the past.

The Moon Watch is an Inform game with plenty of background images and sound, having a lot better multimedia experience than most games from that time.

You play as a cosmonaut sent to a tiny, restrictive base on the moon. There is a red button you were told to never touch, but a call from leadership comes and you are told to press the red button. Then the game starts.

As others have noted, it can be pretty hard to get started in this game. I found some reading material, a phone, a drawer with interesting things in it, and I was able to open a door to the outside (looking back, I shouldn't have been surprised (Spoiler - click to show)I couldn't go through it, as this is a one-room game.) But I couldn't figure out to progress.

It turns out that a huge part of the game's programming and puzzles is based on (Spoiler - click to show)keyword-style text, where you type whatever you want and it searches your text for keywords. Even the very first puzzles are based on this.

There were just so many possibilities in the space of all commands that I had too much difficulty and had to run to a walkthrough. But the writing was interesting, although the ending took me by surprise.