A Very Strong Gland

What a fun little game!

This is a single-stroke parser game, a genre which I've seen a few of in the last year or two and not many more before then. So a single keypress becomes an entire command. It was disconcerting at times (especially trying to repeat past commands by hitting the up arrow, which maps to NORTH) but I eventually got the hold of it.

The idea is that you're kidnapped by aliens who submit you to nonsensical tests, until disaster strikes. Now they rely on you for help!

Gameplay is limited to only two action: eXamine and Touch. A few other commands like LOOK and WAIT also work. This may not seem like a lot to work with, but it's like the Library of Babel. That library is a conceptual idea where every possible 410-page book is in a library, containing essentially any novel that is ever written. Someone once pointed out that it's not as weird as you might think, as you could make your own 'library of babel' with two books that only have one page each (one with a 0 in it and one with a 1 in it); by reading them in the right order, you could reproduce any possible text.

So it's the same idea here. The simple two commands are made more complex by having cycling environmental elements, like buttons that do different things every time you touch them, or timers you can set off, or additional attributes you can acquire and then remove (which behave like extra verbs). So the limited command set is just a blind.

This is really hard to come up with puzzles for; I wrote a giant game last year with different areas, and one I specifically wanted to mimic Arthur DiBianca's style. It was by far the hardest to code, the most buggy, and the hardest to figure out, trying to wrassle tons of moving scenes and machine parts.

The puzzles in this game are similar to math research, where you just try to find patterns or loopholes and bang your head against a wall until you solve it. I got stuck in the middle, and was typing up a question to ask for help, but as I typed I figured it out. The final puzzle stymied me too; I had the right idea, but my timing was off.

The story is sparse but has funny parts. Everything familiar has a goofy name and everything goofy has a familiar name. Objects are clearly chosen so that they start with distinct letters of the alphabet (like 'yo-yo'). Overall the aliens reminded me of those in the movie Home.

I had fun with this. Several of the puzzles were very frustrating before I solved them and fun after.