The Golden Wombat of Destiny

Baf's Guide

A weird little game set in a lost city in the middle of a mangrove swamp. Has some engaging fauna and a few good puzzles based on non-local effects. Starts with a maze, but once you stumble across the exit, you can save the game and never have to deal with it again.

-- Carl Muckenhoupt

SPAG
The puzzles are difficult, often unfairly so -- one requires some Shakespeare knowledge, another requires a realization that two machines on opposite sides of the city are linked somehow, and most require startling leaps of logic. The walkthrough in the solutions directory on GMD is handy. On the other hand, there is a certain elegance to a few of the puzzles -- at one point, careful study of the geography of the city is rewarded. And the parser, for the most part, is good enough to recognize a variety of syntaxes, so "guess-the-verb" is never an issue. For a homemade parser, Golden Wombat's is fairly effective -- full sentences are handled well (though not pronouns or undo, irritatingly), and there are no disambiguation problems that I encountered. And the writing, while hardly flowery, is competent -- important events are thoroughly described, while ordinary rooms are simply treated as ordinary.
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SynTax
The game doesn't contain a vast number of locations (not counting that unmentionable swamp) so mapping is pretty easy apart from one room which may have you confused for a while as each time you go through it, it contains different things. Don't worry, all will be revealed. There are a few puzzles to sort out before you can explore the whole area such as how to get rid of the enormous termite which >flumps< its squidgy body in front of you each time you try to pass it and how to open the door in the Avenue. Once the area is mapped, it's a case of looking at the items that you possess which range from the normal (a jewel box) to the bizarre (a dead potto, whatever that might be) and working out what the heck to do with them. However, despite the number of us that were stuck in the game, all the puzzles ARE logical and sensible, at least in retrospect (aren't they always!).
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