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A snappy but linear excursion, February 12, 2022Beet the Devil primarily shines in its writing. nearly every sentence is bursting with the PC's personality, from his individual judgments of the goings-on around him to his phlegmatic reaction to very extraordinary events.
that said, Beet the Devil is essentially a long, linear corridor, with the useful items front-loaded in the first few locations. you never have more than one puzzle to work on, and most of the solutions involve using vegetables for purposes they were clearly not intended for.
a small amount of lateral thinking is needed in some places, though if you WAIT at a location for a few turns you can usually get some kind of indication of how to proceed. the final single-turn puzzle is so obvious yet so difficult to think of that it's probably a masterpiece (on par with Madventure's).
on the negative side, the implementation is a bit shallow. TALK TO would have been nice, given the extraordinary number of puzzle NPCs, and many reasonable solutions to problems didn't work because the parser had trouble with prepositional phrases. as noted, the game is linear, so if you're stuck on a puzzle you're going to stay stuck. the few places that it seems the game is about to open up, it turns out only one exit is usable. you can get hints from the PRAY command, but they only tell you which object to use, not how.
overall, the writing is worth the half-hour of your time it'll probably take to make it through. i'd love to see something more elaborate from the author.