Advent Door

Not fully satisfying as a standalone game or story (which is to be expected), but fairly good for what it is, which is a short puzzle with one mechanic.

It has a very thin layer of fiction added on top for flavor, but it's really the text-game version of one of those simple tactile puzzles that requires you to move things around in a specific order to solve — remove all the screws! Slide the blocks around in the correct order to form an image! This is a type of puzzle which has become ubiquitous in a mobile game format. I found myself wanting it to have more "levels".

This game was well-served by its map-based nature, as I quite enjoyed having to map the puzzle out myself. I think that this is the main thing that the text-based format added to the puzzle experience.

I'm giving it 3/5 stars, but my main problem with it is that I wanted there to be more of it!

I don't have much more to say than what's in the title--this was a quick game with a clever mechanic that required mapping and doing some careful thinking to figure out how to achieve what I needed, and it was very satisfying when I succeeded! The bits of worldbuilding and descriptions keep it from being too abstract. A nice way to spend a half hour.

This parser game is primarily a well-designed puzzle, which intrinsic upsides and downsides. The upsides : the gameplay is really easy to master, and the way to escape is a tricky one (hint : (Spoiler - click to show) to convert a east door in a west one, you must leave it on the garden wall and pick it up by the other side). The downsides : it's just a (good) game, which offers only the pleasure to map an unknown place (like one can do reading a CYOA book).
For the curious (for instance these who wants to program in Inform) or the cheaters (but it only help them to map the place, nothing more), the author left the codesource on his website

This game is a small, well-executed puzzle that includes enough atmosphere and hints at backstory to keep things entertaining.

The presentation is excellent — the player must use an unconventional mechanic to navigate through locations in the game, but the parser clearly indicates when the puzzle's rules are blocking the player from attempting something. When the player does attempt a move that's allowed, the parser is very generous about understanding actions without getting too fussy about procedures.

(Spoiler - click to show)The process of opening doors, closing doors, taking doors, and placing doors was much more streamlined than I expected. I ended up typing out a lot of extra commands before I realized that some of the actions didn't need to be explicitly spelled out.