The Shack

As I write this, The Shack is the top-rated Quest game on textadventures.co.uk. It's 50 rooms, with dozens of puzzles. Every room comes with some open-license pixel art, and many rooms come with background sound effects, like wind rushing and birds chirping.

Winning the game requires meticulously examining everything, which I found to be a mostly frustrating experience. Most rooms have a "You can see" paragraph, but many, many objects that are meant to be examined aren't mentioned in "You can see," so you have to try examining everything mentioned in the room description.

IMO, if the author wants to require that, then everything that is mentioned in the room description should be examinable, and have an interesting, rewarding description when you do it. But the game frequently mentions stuff that can't be examined in the room description, giving you a generic "I can't see that" error message. Getting that error message makes it no fun at all to explore this game.

Also, I did encounter a few parser issues:

• You often have to CUT X WITH Y instead of USE Y ON X.
• Sometimes you have to USE KEY ON X instead of UNLOCK X.
• You have to USE BATTERY ON X rather than USE BATTERY IN X.
• The game has a torch (a flashlight), but you can't just turn it on; as you enter a dark space, you have to USE TORCH ON X to turn it on and enter.
• Sometimes you have to PULL X or PUSH X when the game doesn't allow you to MOVE X.

Parser issues like these can give the player a misleading sense of "no, that's not the right answer," rather than "you almost got it, keep going."

Once you've finished examining everything, and once you get past the parser issues, the game flows pretty smoothly from there. I like puzzle solutions to be surprising but inevitable in hindsight, and I'm not really sure any of these puzzles did that for me, but the puzzles at least felt fair and reasonable, once I'd finished the examine-a-thon. The puzzles felt like the sort of puzzles that the authors thought are "supposed" to be in a text adventure. It feels like an all-you-can-eat buffet with food that's decent, but nothing to write home about.

The Shack implies a mysterious sci-fi plot, but it's hardly a spoiler to say that this plot is never explained in the game, which ends on a cliffhanger. The end promises a "Part 2" that AFAIK was never implemented.