Iyashikei - The Fountain

This is a ZIL game, a system I haven’t seen used much (the most recent I remember is Max Fog’s IFComp game The Restaurant at the End of the Universe). It’s a retro language that’s recovered from the one Infocom used, I think.

This game is a peaceful nature walk; the game whose genre is closest is, in my opinion, The Fire Tower, another game spent inspecting peaceful places.

This game is fairly short; at first, I just found a boat, a path, and a fountain, and I couldn’t find any other locations mentioned in the exits. I tried randomly walking and eventually found my way to a waterfall and later a cave.

The writing was peaceful, it reminded me of Hypnobirthing tapes my ex-wife had at one point. It was a bit repetitive though. In my first 20 moves, I saw the word ‘tranquil’ a lot:

embark on a tranquil journey
smooth and tranquil journey
its beauty a tranquil retreat
the clearing is a tranquil haven
Set in a tranquil clearing,
Several other words were heavily repeated as well. The descriptions were longer than necessary, and could use some tinkering with structure; I’ve found that in IF people almost always look to the bottom of paragraphs for movable or interactable items and to the middle for less important scenery like tables and desks. So I think it could be useful to cut out the repeated words and rearrange the paragraphs to have the most interesting things at the bottom.

Overall, a small but peaceful nugget of a game.