Loadstone

I'd been intrigued by the idea of Charm Cochran's Inventory Puzzle Seedcomp seed when I saw it, so I was excited to play the game that it sprouted. And it was fun to see the concept executed, with worldbuilding and a narrative around it. While ultimately I used the author's provided hints to solve it, I had gotten very close to one of the three possible solutions (albeit more through stumbling around than any cleverness).

I played online to take advantage of the game's custom features, implemented with Vorple; these include a bottom bar listing actions, which have menus that pop up upon hovering and can then be clicked (so hovering on the "take" action, for example, will open a list of takeable objects, and clicking one attempts taking it), and a compass with icons representing adjacent locations, which you can click to travel to. These features all worked well, except for a bug that causes the compass and all action links to duplicate every time you restart the game.

I used the hints to see the two alternate solutions as well, but I think they would both be difficult to arrive at organically, both suffering from underclueing and/or misleading descriptions; one I struggled with even after reading all the hints. (Spoiler - click to show)Trying to turn on the stove gives the response "It isn't something you can switch", which made me think the stove was merely decorative, and even after the hints told me to boil the safta, doing so was a challenge. My various incorrect attempts gave no feedback, but eventually I hit on the correct two-command sequence "put safta in pot. put pot on stove." At that point, the safta starts to heat without the player needing to actually turn the stove on. As for the other, I didn't realize the (Spoiler - click to show)posts were directly below the tower; when you're in the field, the description says "the tower looms over you to the west", but the tower isn't implemented here, which made me think it was distant scenery.

With these issues polished up, I think this would be quite a solid little puzzle game!