Lost Pig

In this game you play an orc named Grunk who has been sent to find the lost pig that escaped from the farm he works at. I first played this game in middle school and just recently replayed it as an adult and I enjoyed it just as much as I did the first time. The fact that the story is told directly from Grunk's point of view makes the game ten times more hilarious. I recommend trying every command you can think of because trust me, you will get hilarious responses back for most of them. I also like the fact that the game has puzzles which can be solved by using various objects within the cave. Overall, I think this is a great, humorous game that is perfect for both beginners and experienced IF players alike.

This was the first parser game I played (beyond entering some commands into Adventure and Zork ages ago), which means I suffered from some parser-related beginner mistakes that delayed my progress quite a bit (and required walkthrough lookups[1]). I have since come to understand these conventions and doubt I would get stuck the same way.

My playing time estimation is very approximate because I switched between three devices as I played the game, retracing my steps on each. This is possible thanks to the small size of the game. That said, calling it small is a little unfair, because it is incredibly responsive. Almost every action has an interesting reaction, if not effect. This was both a blessing and a curse for a new player; it made exploration satisfying even when I was stuck, but it also made it a little difficult to know when I was barking up the wrong tree. The scoring system to telegraph progress was nice for that purpose.

The puzzles were (not counting parser game beginner gaffes) absolutely solvable and logical. Some puzzles were solvable in parallel, which confused me as a beginner but again, that probably says more about me.

The only thing I wasn't thrilled about was the narrative, which I found to be a little on the shallow end. The game introduces a setting with a backstory, but it is only used as a set for the puzzles.

[1]: I didn't think to examine things as thoroughly as I should have, it took some time until I figured out how to use a thing with another thing, and I didn't think that if (Spoiler - click to show)something has a barely interesting effect, doing more of that thing might have a more interesting effect! (spoiler only in the sense that it explicates a parser IF convention that is a puzzle solution in Lost Pig.)