PURE

(Based on the IFComp 2025 version)

A dark downward inescapable journey into the bowels of a grisly dungeon…

The player is confronted with a decidely enigmatic protagonist in PURE. While the PC and the main NPC have knowledge of past events, and refer to them frequently in veiled terms, the player is left in the dark. This creates an intriguing tension between player and PC, and through the PC, between player and NPC, and player and surroundings. Some unspoken backstory hovers in the air, some chain of events that would explain the protagonist’s current predicament, it pervades the weird and threatening rooms you encounter, but the player is shut out of this understanding shared by the characters.
It’s rewarding in this regard, but ultimately unenlightening, to observe the attitudes and behaviours of the NPCs towards the protagonist as they evolve throughout the game.

The surroundings of the game-world are dreadfully sinister. The entire game is one linear descent into deeper and darker spaces where revulsion and adoration overlap. The further into the game, the more any notion of an outside world seems to vanish, leaving nothing but room after room of gloom and twisted moral decisions.

Puzzles are present but trivial, their true purpose is to put pressure on the protagonist, and via the protagonist the player, to decide whether to push onwards, deeper. Progress in PURE means commiting to cruel and gruesome actions. Combined with the unknown but ever-present backstory, this enhances the tension between PC and player, and also the curiosity of the latter. The curiosity then conflicts with the player’s growing disgust, placing the real difficulty outside of the game, in the hands of the player who must decide whether to stomach more of the moral complicity and oozing gore that keeps coming.

PURE deviates in some important features from the standard approach of parser games.
–Whereas movement between rooms is instantaneous in most parser games, or described in a single easily missed sentence ( > N --“You plod onward on the muddy road.”), in PURE the descriptions of travel from room to room, the behaviour of the NPCs during that travel, elements of the dungeon noticed in passing, account for at least half the text of the game, drawing the attention of the player to this ongoing downward journey.
–The rooms themselves are elaborately and evocatively drawn in the initial description, but almost no deeper layers of implementation are provided. Instead, keywords are highlighted in colour to indicate objects accessible to interaction or to suggest actions. It feels like an agreement between author and player to treat the parser environment with its prompt and typed input as analogous with a click-based interface.
I’m normally a sucker for deeply layered implementation, hidden nooks and crannies, and details only revealed after thorough use of X (and SEARCH, but that’s another discussion…), but I could appreciate the appeal of this approach. It provides a clear view of the important objects and it lessens deliberations about what commands to try. It also strengthens the overarching driving thrust of the game, to push onward and downward relentlessly.
But…
The parser-as-click-interface is sorely lacking in execution.
For starters, the bits of scenery that are not implemented (and thus not highlighted) should nonetheless have a general customised response along the lines of “That’s not important.” instead of saying to the nosy player who decided to examine an uncoloured noun “You can’t see that here.” (Cue player shouting at screen “But it’s right there!”)
Secondly, and more importantly, the author does not follow the agreement! I found several interactable items that were crucial to progress but not highlighted in the text, and at least one highlighted object that was not interactable. With such gaps in what should be a straightforward rule, I became suspicious, and ended up examining a whole lot of unhighlighted nouns because “You never know…” This kind of broken trust made the gaming experience somewhat uneasy, with doubt always in the back of my mind.
In fact, I often felt that although the parser medium is a traditional fit for a dungeon crawl, this game would benefit from pushing the highlighted-keywords approach that extra bit across the medium boundary and just go for a full choice-based approach.
–Another idiosyncracy of PURE compared to standard parser conventions is that it denotes directions in terms of left/right/forwards instead of NESW. Okay, this can enhance the player’s feeling of groundedness in the game world, feet firmly on the ground. But once I noticed that the body-centered directions were mapped one-on-one onto the usual compass directions, I couldn’t help imagining my PC sidling leftward into a side room while taking pains to keep the right side of his body oriented to the east side of the compass rose…

The writing is very good. As I wrote above, the elaborate presentation of movement pushes the player into this unavoidable journey. The vivid descriptions of the horrible rooms, the NPCs changing behaviours and attitudes, and the protagonist’s devolving physical appearance shown through interactions with the main NPC frequently made my spine shiver. (Sometimes they also elicited a chuckle, at times the text suffers from a light touch of adjectivitis in its striving to be maximally evocative.)
On the whole, the prose does effectively draw forth a moody and dark atmosphere, with some shudderingly evocative, beautifully gruesome paragraphs at its best.

So come… Take the journey down these stairs, spiraling into dark catharsis, horrific elevation,… or more gore.