Down, the Serpent and the Sun

This game is Chandler Groover's earliest game. In it, a feathered serpent devours you while you are standing on a Mesoamerican pyramid, and you can only move up and down within the body for most of the game. While flesh and organic parts abound, there is also a lot of symbolic imagery providing for some vivid descriptions.

The reaction it received and his postmortem almost serve as an origin story for his later games. He mentions (mild spoilers for the types of puzzles in the game but not their solutions):

(Spoiler - click to show)Other people do not play parser games like I do. I like to examine everything, so I wrote descriptions for almost everything in my game, with the idea that people would examine things to uncover clues. However, many people didn’t seem to do that, so they missed clues for the puzzles if the clues weren’t placed in the general room descriptions. In the future, I cannot expect other players to share my devotion to examining the scenery, unless I give explicit instructions that this should be done (which I’ll most likely do, because I love the mechanic of examining things within things within things).

and about puzzles in general:

"Don’t add puzzles just to add puzzles. This probably means, for me, don’t add puzzles. I’m not nearly as interested in the puzzle-solving aspect of interactive fiction as I am with its potential for creating atmosphere, or for warping a narrative’s meaning with dynamic text. Those are what I ought to focus more on."

Groover's later emphasis on light-puzzle and limited parser games with easy-to-understand mechanics does seem like a direct result of these early design decisions.

I love the vivid imagery in the game. I do agree it takes close attention. I thought I remembered how to beat it, from years ago, but even knowing part of the puzzle I had to go to the walkthrough after going up and down the serpent several times in order to find the starting place of the first puzzle.

I liked this game enough to base a significant chunk of my game Grooverland in it, and I'm surprised I had never reviewed it. Definitely worth checking out! One of the smoothest-implemented 'first games' I've seen.

The serpent has eaten the sun. You are the last one who can get it back.

Based loosely on Aztec myths, this game presents a prime example of Groover's signature imagination. Down is dark and bloody - set, after all, in the maw of a monster - but unlikely metaphors abound. Gemstones in gullets. A sun in the stomach.

Contrasts abound in this game. You must relinquish control in the beginning to be able to participate, despite being a warrior - a person of action! The serpent is a broken, diseased creature, despite being undeniably powerful - having swallowed the sun and defeated all before you.

Though somewhat more ornate, and definitely more outspoken than some of Groover's other games, Down, the Serpent and the Sun is well worth playing.