Their First Meeting

TFM features two main puzzles, classical ones you likely have seen before. Not the "wolf goat cabbage", liar/truth-teller, find the wrong-weight pebble or logic grid sense, but technological discoveries. This is a good choice for the tutorial, especially since there is a story woven in with them. A mysterious woman takes you to her hut, and you need to make fire. There are magic gems which aren't explained but definitely give motivation to see what they're there for. There's even tension over whether this woman is hostile. You don't know much about her, not even her name!

All this is promising, especially with only four rooms, where it's pretty clear where you need to do what. The graphics, too, suggest nothing tricky needs to be done. They'er functional, and I don't mean that as a backhanded compliment. A river has fish. A future fire pit has rocks nearby. Cut-scenes have you sitting with your new acquaintance. The story isn't very florid, so florid graphics aren't needed.

But things break down a bit with the parser. TFM seems to try to establish confusion, but gives a litany of "what are you thinking?! Come on" or (paraphrased) Geez, flaky, focus there, which probably weren't intended to heckle the player, but it feels that way. Then there are a lot of fourth-wall clues like "you can probably figure out what to do here." Where I had, but I hadn't figured out the exact language.

Combine that with the tutorial that only shows up if you ask for it at the start or type TUTORIAL, and I felt left out on an island. And the thing is: there shouldn't be much confusion with starting a fire. There's some guessing verbs (I tried COOK FISH when the right verb was ROAST,) and in one case SIT TABLE gives the generic error where SIT works. TFM recognizes some synonyms, but this seemed like the ideal place to have *match "_ ROPE"* syntax to let the player know they're on the right track.

The second part is a more recent technology than fire. It's all in the room description in the cave, what you need, but the problem is that the graphic and text combine to take up more than one full screen. A chance was missed here to highlight (or have the option to) the things that were useful. GREEN for what you can use, YELLOW for what's used later, maybe. As it was, it wasn't enough to get a parser error when something didn't work, because I couldn't quite trust the parser.

Creating fire (and a meal) and the other technology both lead to a cut-scene which suggests a magic world. It was a legitimately good reward for the puzzles beyond not having to fight the parser, and it suggests the author would have nailed things down if they'd just have known. (The game lists testers, too.)

I replayed TFM after winning, because it did have a good enough story, and also because I wanted to try an experiment. How much could I remember of the verbs I needed to guess? I missed a few. It would have been smoother with a little more testing and a better narrative voice/internal dialogue, which unfortunately might serve to chase newer players away (an option for harsh or helpful mode would've been neat!) But it deserves credit for its ambition.