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Review
Having now played several punyinform games in a row, I now realize that many design features I thought were poor choices are actually 'baked in' to punyinform: specifically no UNDO and pedantic phrasing for disambiguation.
It also seems that most games in this PunyInform jam were written by newish players who aren't part of a culture of intense beta testing or familiarity with recent parser games.
So that puts a lot of things in perspective. Given this background, this game isn't that bad. I had to look at the itch page for some hints on how to proceed from time to time, but besides that it's fairly straightforward. You have a few chores to complete before your boss arrives, and much of the difficulty is figuring out the right commands to fulfill the actions required.
The one thing that elevated this game for me was an excellent puzzle involving cigarettes. I've never seen a puzzle quite like this and I think I might nominate it for an award next year, if I remember.
Comments on this review
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I'm glad you could overlook the shortcomings of this particular flavor of Inform. Your review is spot on: I have not played much recent IF, and with the task of designing my first game ever, learning Inform from scratch, it was all I could do to submit the game just under the wire without external testing.
That said, I felt I had created one good puzzle for the game (the cigarettes), and I'm quite happy you found it to be compelling enough to say such nice things about it.
