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Slick-looking custom parser in Godot with sci-fi and monsters, August 13, 2022This game was entered in Parsercomp, and I'll admit I didn't finish it (though I got pretty far!)
You play as someone in a fairly secluded area that sees lightning hit a radiotower, and then strange things happening. I ended up exploring a very large house filled with bizarre tech.
The game is written in Godot, which I think is an open-source alternative to Unity (maybe I'm wrong?). The game loaded quickly and looked nice, with several animations and a map that updated frequently, and also some visual puzzles.
I struggled mightily at first to even see the game, as it was taller and wider than my laptop screen and didn't seem to have dynamic resizing. I tried fullscreening the browser, then I tried shrinking and fullsizing, and only then did I realize there was a 'fullscreen' button at the bottom. One itch option actually lets you make the game fullscreen from the beginning, I think.
Instead of having the player guess the commands or remember a commonly used set, like most traditional parsers, this game has a specific list of commands which can be used, about 6 on average. These commands don't admit any abbreviations, and while there are clickable links for each command, the links don't enter the commands for you; instead they tell you how to use them.
Text is split in three areas: the room description, the outcome of non-important action below that, and your input even further below, similar to Scott Adams games.
The game branches into several endings, some early, some later, and includes a lot of weapons of various efficacy and different monsters that randomly pop out to get you.
I encountered a game crashing bug early on (don't inspect the truck seat!) but I got around it. I got much further, until I found (Spoiler - click to show)a still figure watching the wall in a basement that took 3 weapons.. After I defeated it, with just a sliver of health left, the game said I needed to type NEXT to continue, but NEXT didn't work. Having encountered at least two game-locking bugs, and having heard that it ends on a cliffhanger, and having seem much of the game, I decided not to continue.
I get the impression that the author isn't heavily involved in a lot of current interactive fiction, and so just went with their own direction and imagination on what a parser game should look like, based on old memories (this is all wild assumptions). I find it nice to see what directions people would go in if not constrained by a wider society or community, and this seems pretty neat, kind of reminiscent of Adventuron, which seems to have had a similar development pipeline.
I give the game 2 stars for descriptiveness and emotional impact but bugs make it harder to give more. If fixed (along with typos and quality of life improvements), this would be a 4 or 5 star game.