Iyashikei - The Fountain

Iyashikei is a serene mostly-on-the-rails, short (15 minutes tops) diversion that feels like something a hypnotist might use to try to hypnotize someone. BERAAAKK! (chicken noises) Like, you know, the hypnotist that tells the audience member to cluck like a chicken, BERAAAK!!! (cluck, cluck) And when they wake up, they have no actual memory of doing it. BERAAKKK!!

Unfortunately, Iyashikei does not actually hypnotize you and make you act like a chicken. (CLUCK! CLUCK! Scratch the ground with talons.) It is rather peaceful, but with conflict comes story. A story with no conflict to resolve, is it really a story? BERAAAAAK!!! (cluck, cluck)

The serene-icity? BEREAAAK!! (is that even a (cluck) word? (cluck cluck))
Is broken by the lack of implementation of the scenery. A lot of gorgeous scenery is described. But when you try to take it in, by examining it, smelling it, tasting it, feeling it, listening to it... BERAAAK!!!!
the "it" is always "you don't see any 'it' here" (cluck, cluck)

So, apparently this game does not actually hypnotize you, (cluck, cluck) nor does it let you explore the peaceful scenery in a detailed way. BERAKK!!!

I like where the author was thinking here, but it needed more time in the BERAAKK!!! (cluck, cluck) oven.

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.