Lost Pig

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.)