Der Turm des Hexenmeisters

This game was entered in the IF Grand Prix 2024, in German. In it, you play as someone determined to stop a sorceror from hatching a dragon egg and dooming the nearby community.

Gameplay revolves around looking around, exploring, and then using different items you find to open up new areas.

It's written in a custom engine which looks visually appealing but which I struggled with. A lot of objects weren't implemented that were mentioned in the text, and many synonyms I've become accustomed to from other German games didn't work here, so I had about 25 commands at the beginning that weren't understood. I finally got one to work by accident. Exploring around, some commands were hinted in the text and just didn't work; an example (not from the game) would be like 'it looks like you can pull it!' but 'pull' doesn't work.

Not being a native speaker compounded this problem, but I've seen on the German forums that others had the same problems. I ended up using the walkthrough helpfully provided, pausing here and there to explore some.

Other than that, the game is a good fantasy game. Some of the puzzle solutions were a bit confusing but the game is small enough that just trying everything should be fine.

A new IF engine takes a ton of work. This one is very promising but could use some more synonyms. For instance, in Inform I can type 'Oben' and 'Hoch' and both make me go up, or just 'schau' for looking around (maybe these are unusual commands and I've trained myself wrong by misplaying other German titles, a native speaker would have to correct me). I see now when writing that there was a Help page on the front page of the game, but I didn't see that when I first played, and typing Hilfe didn't bring anything up in game. The help page would have helped some, though, but it doesn't mention the up and down directions, which I struggled with.