All That Shimmers...

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 26 Review

Style: Parser
Played: 7/21/26
Playtime: 45m, defeated witch

There is an aspect to parser creation that really speaks to an author’s intentionality. In book-fiction the author is attempting to paint a picture and mood in the reader’s head. They have full control over the depth of detail they present, and how that depth manages pacing and foregrounds environment versus character versus plot. There can be a lot of ‘camera work’ to vary focus to surroundings, to actors, to events. A fundamental difference between parser-IF and book-F is that the author has only limited control over the camera, as it were. Elaborate environments can be explored in arbitrarily deep detail at the player’s whims. This is where cracks can often appear - a block of setting description repeatedly giving "you see no..." in response to deeper poking is about as dispiriting as it gets. Thanks to early computer memory limitations, such textual flourishes were EXPENSIVE and hence back pressured. This had the effect of creating a terse, meaningful-detail-only paradigm that served early developers quite well.

Today, the temptation might be use all that suddenly-cheap memory (though who knows? Maybe AI’s gluttonous memory diet will take us back to those days!) and go hog wild. That would be overlooking the second, perhaps more important, aspect of these early designs. Few nouns mean few things to distract the player mean MUCH tighter control over gameplay. Over the camera.

ATS did not overlook this. Whether painstakingly deliberate or intuitive, this is as tight a gameplay implementation as I can remember. (Almost) Every noun’s importance is signaled by simply BEING MENTIONED AT ALL. Descriptions yield actionable items and directions and almost nothing else. Conversations are minimal and transactional, never muddying the waters. It may not be OBVIOUS how to use things until fully explored, but rest assured they absolutely are. It makes for an immersive gameplay experience where you are never pulled out of flow by missing some small detail buried in description.

Why is the witch bad? Immaterial, she just is. What else is in the shop besides a water vending machine and a sample plate of cheese? Nothing and doesn’t matter anyway. Where is the resident of that dog house? Who cares? None of this is to say that the environment is bland. It is not! The text is suffused with good humor and amiability and judiciously uses evocative adjectives to apply some color. And where the text stops, our brains gladly shade in the remaining background.

I found it as controlled, concise a work as I can remember experiencing. Given this gushing on text discipline, it will come as no surprise that this work MOVED. It was more like fencing than crossword puzzling. Game proffers this! Player ripostes with that! Game pivots to this other! Player responds with a flurry of blocks! There was no sitting back and stroking my chin, mulling over possibilities - it’s time for another thrust! What a great experience! It helps that it felt perfectly sized to its aims. If I had to fence for three hours I would be EXHAUSTED (and probably quite scarred). Here, the puzzle sequences roared from one to the next until it was done! It didn’t forget the casual player either. There is one quirky NPC who, once discovered, basically acts as a hint machine. I don’t know how critical the hints WERE, given the tight text all around it, but lord knows I have run aground on simple puzzles before. This NPC was a safety valve of information, just in case.

I try try try to not dwell on an author’s identity too much when I review works. Rarely can any good come from that and the opportunity for misstep is HUGE. However, I am also patently unafraid to confidently stride into quicksand so here we are. I am unfamiliar with this author, and could only find two works by them, both seeming quite recent. The fact that a relatively new author produced something so tight and accomplished is a great testament to either their preparation or DEEPLY intuitive understanding of the medium. Both are quite commendable.

There were a few glitches I noted - most of which were location descriptions that failed to annotate their exits. There were a few items that were never used, which really stood out and became jarring by their exception. I don’t think I ever found a use for the tape, for example. There was a nice bit of business with (Spoiler - click to show)the name on a doghouse whose missing component existed, but seemed irretrievable and unnecessary. That might have been the item I spent the most time fiddling with. Honestly, those were completely UNimpactful on the wonderful, fleet vibe of this thing.

Sure, not ALL that shimmers is gold. But sometimes shimmery things ARE IN FACT ABSOLUTELY GOLD.