A Puzzled Soul

This is a lovely little game with themes that I like. It is a bit rough in execution sometimes, but that could easily be fixed in a future update.

It's a surreal game where you are being hunted inexorably by a monster through a surreal world. Gameplay consists of passing various obstacles which slow down the monster, and which for most of the gameplay consists of doors.

Most of the rooms, in particular, have 3 doors, each with their own way of opening, and with different symbolic elements. It quickly becomes clear that the whole game is symbolic or meaning-filled. I played through twice, opening an entirely different set of doors the second time and having a final choice.

I haven't been able to determine yet if there are 'good options' or 'bad options' for the doors, as the two doors I got in each room were similar to each other, so either they're all the same or the 'hardest door' in each room is special.

The execution had some issues, mostly things that come from a complicated game, like having extra lines or extra full stops. I think that having more synonyms for actions could be useful.

The overall story of the game is one told with a heavy hand at the end, but the vivid language used throughout balances that, I think. Great job by the authors, and I think that adding more testers and polishing the game for an after-competition release would make this a great long-standing game. In the meantime, though, the missing synonyms and typos could cause trouble for players.

A Puzzled Soul is a short timed parser made in Inform, in which you are trying to escape a creature hunting you, by solving some questionable puzzles to get to the next section. If you take too long solving them, you’re sent back to the start to try again. There are two endings, dependent on your choice at the very end of the game.

Each section has multiple puzzles you can solve (though only one is necessary to get to the next section, and you won’t have time to do them all in one playthrough anyway), with seemingly different difficulty (really puzzled to how to solve some of them, I gave up pretty quickly). It was interesting to get branching in a parser, and giving the player agency in how to get to the next section… which is ironic because you are essentially forced to do awful things to progress and escape the creature (like (Spoiler - click to show)stealing from a confession box, poisoning a well, or desecrating a grave). Coupled with the sense urgency from the timer, it creates a pretty fun environment.

On the other side, I did struggle quite a bit with the implementation of the puzzles with regards to the timer. Because we have a limited amount of commands before the creature catches you, there’s only so much you can do/test before you’re sent to the start. And when it’s not always clear what you need to do to solve a puzzle (or what command to use to do something, because some are custom, like crossing wall instead of going west, where we’re told we can go). It became pretty frustrating at times, but with a bit of persistence (and Saving at every new room), it is possible to get to the end.