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I was excited to add this game to my list of surreal games on trains, an oddly specific genre that pops up in all years and among all platforms.

In this parser game, you enter some abandoned train tunnels and an abandoned train. You are tasked with taking photos of 'something that wasn't meant to be seen'; at the end of the game, you're scored on your photos.

Gameplay is a combination of escape-room style gameplay and bizarre NPCs. There's the creepy little girl Lily who's just chilling in an abandoned train that you just unsealed the door to, and the Crazy Rat Man (I'll let you guess what he's like). Puzzles include things like color-coded keycards and buttons, items like crowbars and rope, and the extensive use of your camera for both information gathering (the author came up with some creative ideas in this vein) and for scoring points.

The whole game is linear, not in puzzles, but in outline; all the rooms run east-to-west with occasional up or down moves.

Parser implementation is mostly good; it looks to me to be the level of someone who is intelligent and talented but doesn't have a ton of experience yet. The five testers listed surely contribute to the state of the game (which didn't have any major bugs that I found), but there could be more synonyms and more use of Inform's special tricks. For the synonyms, I'd recommend the author read the automatic transcripts IFComp makes and look for times people got error messages, and try implementing any reasonable commands that they tried (if they plan on a post-comp update). For the special tricks of Inform, I'd incorporate more special messages for objects that you find. Objects are often listed in the text and then again at the end in a 'you can see , __, and here'. This can be fixed by either making the object scenery, putting the object's name in brackets (like "There is a [shelf] on the wall") or by saying 'The initial description of the shelf is ""', or something like that.

This was fun. The twist at the end did explain a lot of things. I think the game overall is one I would consider a 'success' as an author and one I enjoyed playing.