Fracture

Sumbitted to the La petite mort category in Ectocomp 2020, Fracture is a very short and slightly experimental parser IF that puts you in a precarious position and allows only a single command to be used. The whole IF is actually based around this limitation, and it makes very good use of it. Thematically centred on suffering and decay, the story is splendidly horrid, and the writing is excellent.

This game is directly modeled on Lime Ergot and Toby's Nose, where the main action is found by examining something over and over again, including things mentioned in the description.

It's more rough than those two, with some typos and less direction for the player, but the worldbuilding was intriguing to me and the descriptiveness well-done.

It's a brief game, but I played through it twice and feel there's still more for me to discover.

A single-verb text adventure: EXAMINE everything to make progress. Why can't you do anything else? Because you're in your final death-throes, taking your last gasps before you expire in an abandoned church. As well as the physical objects around you, you can examine the memories they bring back, and the details within those memories too. There's no way to survive, you only have a fixed number of turns to live: it will take multiple replays to piece together the full story of this character's mixed-up life. Some English-language problems don't obscure a compelling central mystery. The ultra-deep implementation, with pretty much every noun I tried having further EXAMINE-text, is impressive.