Venience World

Venience World is a metaphorical story about remembrance and physical/mental spaces. It's a Spring Thing Back Garden entry, and the intro to a potentially larger game.

The immediate standout thing is its novel browser-based interface. It's all typed; there's a command prompt even. But beneath that prompt, you'll see the available command(s) at any given point, one word at a time. eg. you'll see "try" underneath the prompt, and after typing try and pressing space it'll say to, and you'll type that, then understand, and you'll type that, and then your command will become bolded and you can press enter to try to understand. If you type anything else it won't allow you to press enter. Sometimes, you'll see more than one command you can type.

There's a mix of more conventional parser IF commands (take envelope, go north) but the interface also allows for internal conversations, thoughts, longer sentences, and other flourishes. One of your most important commands is "begin interpretation".

It looks very nice and clean. There's good color coding and use of bolding and italics and such to convey a lot of what's going on.

It did feel a bit drawn out at points in the first half (either it could've been quicker paced or there could've been a few more options), though it opens up a bit near the end.

But the typing, even completely guided, made me focus on the words more, without getting into the implementation/guesswork messiness of a full parser. Sometimes that was detrimental: when the commands got a bit mundane, or when the actions felt muted ("consider the sense of panic"?). But overall it is a very neat effect, and holds promise.