On a Horse with No Name

On a Horse with No Name is a fast-playing, lightly puzzly fantasy short. It's a tale about a person with amnesia in a trackless waste, but it has better than usual excuses for this, and the main selling point of the piece is its slightly Twilight-Zone twist. Neither the prose nor the setting depth are as strong as the concept itself, but they work well enough to get the point across.

The game's biggest puzzle is a bit underclued -- I had to look at the walkthrough for one step of it -- but it's well integrated: it serves to teach some rules of this story universe that you need in order to understand the stakes of the final scenes.

There are some polish issues. The parser is not fabulous. It's using an earlier version of Alan that gives some unhelpful responses to now-standard kinds of interaction. And I ran into a couple of bugs if I did things out of the expected sequence, but these flaws really weren't serious enough to impede the progress of the game; a few descriptions that were out of sync with the world state, but nothing that made it impossible to continue.

As an aside: there are points where I got stuck because I just needed to WAIT. It's worth giving that a try if your situation seems to be uninteractive.