Staub

This was a well-made Inform game in German with custom CSS. It uses the Hybrid Choices extension for Dialog.

You play as a traveller who comes to a small town looking for your love. In the meantime, though, you find a mystery, as a young man goes missing.

Gameplay revolves mostly around dialogue and exploration, with one puzzle involving several metal implements that I found confusing enough for me (a non-native speaker) to need to look at the walkthrough, but once I saw the commands it made sense.

Between conversations, there is often a lot of fetch-quests, where one person asks you to go find something and bring it back. I felt like it was a lot of fun most of the time, but one specific part felt a little repetitive, as there are three things in a row where you get an item, use it, realize you need another, get it, use it, etc.

Overall, I liked the writing and thought the flashbacks were neat. A very strong game. Near the end there were two weird things; the use of the word (Spoiler - click to show)drugs to refer to illegal things, when it was more (Spoiler - click to show)a reference to pharmaceuticals at the time</spoil>, and a somewhat derogatory term for Asians spoken by an uncultured man.

'Western' is definitely an underutilized IF category so it was nice playing a very polished game in this genre.