The Questionable Substitute

I don't know what the story is with this game. There is no game; we instantly get the game-over screen, being told the game is being reworked, and to stay tuned for updates.

Now, there is a not-insignificant number of IF games which play clever tricks on players, and a 208kb .gblorb seemed a bit much for just this joke. So I tried a few commands, in case the game was pulling one on me. As far as I can tell, there really is no game here, but I was amused at the types of things I tried. I tried all the options it spells out, naturally, to see if any of them would "kick-start" the game. I tried UNDO, though it isn't listed - which would actually make for a cool beginning of a game, if it started with the death screen and you had to undo. I tried "restarting" a few times in a row to see if the game kept a counter and started reacting. I checked to see whether the game was saving a file silently. I tried to SAVE. I tried other regular verbs, just in case the game would respond to them. Finally, I even tried "stay tuned", thinking it'd be really cool if this worked. Alas...

...so, nothing worked, but I was rather surprised at my own patience, and my default position that "there must be a game here, and I'm being tricked". I possibly tricked myself in the end! And maybe this was the point of this entry? Or probably I'm reading too much into it.

Ultimately, though, it's a non-game, a non-entity. The fun that I had with it was me shouting into the echo chamber of my mind, for no other reason than curiosity. It was interesting to see how much the very clever and original people who make adventure games and interactive fiction (especially parser IF, which I predominantly play) have conditioned me to see puzzles where there aren't any.

...oh, on the off-chance that there IS a game here and I just didn't find the magic command (which I find unlikely)... then it's too well-hidden. And it does happen that some games hide some stuff too well, and many players never get to see them... I don't think that's a good thing.