Bureau of Strange Happenings

You are government agent Larch Faraji (they/them) of the Bureau of Strange Happenings, tasked with investigating aliens, ghosts, and other potentially paranormal goings-on and keeping the citizens of the United States safe from all manner of horrible things. And you'll get to that just as soon as you can answer your phone. You see, budget cuts have forced the Bureau out of its nice, cushy Washington DC headquarters into a hastily-converted department store on the edge of a swamp in Maryland. And the Bureau's new secretary has managed to lock your new phone inside your new desk, and the hex key has fallen down an air vent, and your boss is more interested in sixteenth-century alchemists than here-and-now logistics, and…

Structure-wise, this is an Inform parser game with some interesting quirks (the narration is entirely third-person, for example, and room headings are integrated into the descriptions), which is structured as a bureaucratic farce that quickly turns into lighthearted occult-horror pastiche. I'm pretty sure at least parts of it are riffing on The X-Files, which unfortunately I've never seen. It wears its colors on its sleeve, starting out with a very solid bout of participatory comedy—where the jokes are funnier because the game is making you an active part of them instead of just telling them to you—involving trying to answer that damn phone, which quickly leads you into a tunnel to four-dimensional hyperspace in order to access the abandoned laundromat next door.

It's a long game; I barely finished within the two hours allotted, with ample use of the built-in adaptive hints and David Welbourn's excellent walkthrough. And overall, I very much enjoyed it! My big complaint is that it's a game with a lot of potential, and I wish it had gotten more polish to let that potential show through.

For example, there were some truly excellent puzzles hampered by (in my opinion) just a little bit too much obscurity. I loved the puzzle involving a strange way of encoding numbers on a map (well, "map"), for example, and would have loved to solve it entirely myself, but the fact that the key clue says "love is all you need" instead of "you need to get to zero" (relying on the player's knowledge of tennis scoring, and—more importantly—the player connecting this clue to tennis in the first place) sent me to the hints. An important widget is hidden behind a tapestry, but there's no cue that you need to MOVE TAPESTRY to find it, and variants like TAKE TAPESTRY have (custom!) messages saying it shouldn't be moved.

The polish gets thinner and thinner as the game approaches its end, until when you finally have the vitally-important screwdriver to retrieve the vitally-important hex key, this happens:

> \> unscrew vent
> It is fixed in place.
>
> A phone is ringing somewhere to the west.
>
> \> open vent
> Faraji unscrews the four screws and removes the vent cover. They take the hex wrench from inside and put the cover back on.
>
> A phone is ringing somewhere to the west.

And with one particular hidden easter egg (which I won't spoil here), I'd figured out exactly what had to be done, but wasn't able to make the parser accept it until I resorted to emailing the author for help with the syntax.

I enjoyed this game a lot, and I think it's solidly done, with a great tone and very enjoyable puzzles. I just wish it had been given more time for testing and polishing, to keep little obstacles like this from getting in the player's way—because I would have enjoyed it even more if I didn't have to keep returning to the hints and/or walkthrough.