Fired

(Warning: This review might contain spoilers. Click to show the full review.)

In a competition that tends to have long and substantial parser titles that demand all your attention, it's always nice to play a short, nice parser game.

You just got laid off from a shitty job, and you're planning to get back at your boss when you found out that the documents you were planning to leak had been taken away from you.

It's been years since I've played an Inform game with a score system, but I don't mind it. They're a quick and easy way to know I'm heading in the right direction. The puzzles are simple and intuitive for the most part as they focus on examining objects and using items in the right situations. But that kind of signposting is always appreciated.

The game also has one of the most amusing >x myself responses that I've seen in an IFComp entry:

There is one puzzle relating to a [spoiler]blob[/spoiler] that felt very guess-the-verb compared to the other puzzles. But thankfully, there's a > help command that explicitly tells you where to go and what you should do.

All in all, this is a nice appetizer for parser games in IFComp 2025. It's a cute, well-scoped game that doesn't take up much of your time -- I beat it in 30 minutes -- and I had a pleasant time helping our protagonist retaliate against capitalism.