Captain Cutter's Treasure

Captain Cutter's Treasure (CCT) is an impressive, small game. A pirate's daughter has been kidnapped. The ransom is some hidden treasure. You have to find and return it. There's a map to put together, and ... a bit more. But not too much.

The game has a respectable dialogue system that helps you flesh out as much of the story as you want to. There's even a very small puzzle that crosses genres into (Spoiler - click to show)Sokoban, and while you can put the game into an unwinnable state this way, it's relatively clear what to do without feeling dumb and obvious. I was more baffled with how to open a locked door, though when I thought through it, I realized I missed a few clues.

The game has three possible endings that I counted, and since doing the obvious right thing gets the "only okay" ending, there's some interesting meta/detective work. I think I got lucky (Spoiler - click to show)distracting Barnaby when he was on watch--I understood what to do but didn't have as good an idea of the ship's map as I did of the warehouse. Maybe it was just dealing with fore and aft. But it was pleasing to figure out what should generally happen.

This was a really good experience, well-organized and without a lot of red herrings. I'm not surprised

There are some issues of having to disambiguate more than you should need to for the parser, but I think that's more a function of people getting comfortable with programming PunyInform than any serious shortcomings. Besides, there's always the up-arrow on Frotz. So I think this is worth fighting through, and knowing this in advance will hopefully ensure that if you play CCT, you'll be able to see all CCT has to offer.