Witch Hedwig and the Magic Berries Brew

While I may have given this game a lower score, I think it shows markable progression in the author's skill over time. This the fourth Text Adventure Literacy Jam game by this author, and while it has some flaws, it is a complete game with hints and help and is reasonably completable.

You play as a witch with a sick kid, and you have to make a potion to heal them. You go around to different rooms, each with 1-2 items, and you get the three ingredients necessary to make what you need.

The parser is, I think, a two-word parser, as most of my attempts at PUT ___ ON ___ and PUT ____ IN ____ didn't work but 'drop' did in most areas.

There are some fun little twists here and there. The writing is minimalistic, and I struggled with the parser several times. I definitely appreciate the hints and the HELP text.

Witch Hedwig is another of the author's games in AdvSys, and it seems to have the most features. You as Witch Hedwig have to go and find three things in order to heal your son. They're not too bad to find, as it's not a huge world. You learn to find light, and you also need to trade with a pirate to open up a secret passage. So the puzzles all work well and they're pretty coherent. If you just want to put your head down and solve the game, you can do that with little problem. The parser works pretty well, though I had some fights with the singular/plural form of a noun not being recognized.

It all works, and it's satisfying to open up a new passage or make a light source or realize, aha, this is what I need to cut a tree down. Or even the game's final command, which I tried to guess from the recipe, but I realized I was thinking too literally. It was a very appropriate guess the verb. But I would like to see more on the creative side -- it feels like they can do that, based on their willingness to share source, and they shouldn't need to worry if English is their first language.

Because here it feels like there should have been a story, and a weak one would have added to some relatively interesting simple puzzles and given emotional depth. How sick is your son? Did someone make him sick? Was he being careless? As-is, it just feels like doing a job or cooking dinner instead of, well, helping cure your son. Not that there has to be a ton, but the author did a lot of testing to get technical stuff right, and I'd like to see what they can do creatively. It doesn't have to be deep literature, maybe just brief flashbacks.

I also wish something had been done with the notes where the game says it's night or it's morning. There could be a puzzle for that, and I think it would be a good way to stretch ASL's boundaries a bit further. Maybe next game. I'd like to see the author escape their comfort zone a bit more -- they've done a lot of work with the core stuff of building and compiling AdvSys for different platforms, and I'd like to see what they can do on the creative side.