Inside the Facility

The only commands this game accepts are NORTH, EAST, SOUTH, WEST, WAIT, LOOK and STATUS, with actions like picking things up and giving them to NPCs triggered automatically. This is surprisingly effective, and the game contains a variety of puzzles of different types: lock and key, darkness, bribery, manipulate the NPC, figure out the machine, navigation.

I was initially put off by the request to print off a map to fill in as you go, but found it added to the fun, like solving a crossword, and there are certainly puzzles that would have been both harder and less enjoyable without it.

The author knows how to use brevity of writing to good effect – with such a large map, longer descriptions would have made the game more tiring. But they managed to squeeze every drop of clarity and characterisation out of the one-sentence descriptions. Some characters made me laugh or feel sorry for them, and some I took an instant dislike to.

This was an odd one. It almost managed to capture my imagination with its sparse descriptions and limited scenery, but there was still something missing. Maybe the vast number of rooms and large amounts of cycling dialogue made it tempting to start skimming and miss out on some of the setting. I think this is a game played for other reasons than immersion.

I played this as my third parser game -- although with just four cardinal directions and two other actions (wait and status) it doesn't strictly need parser input. I really appreciate the way this game streamlines and automates the parser gameplay to the point where almost all actions happen automatically. And it still manages to set up some good puzzles!

I played this on a phone with the auto-map. In hindsight, I think it would have been a better experience with pen-and-paper mapping. With the auto-map, it was easy for someone with my lack of willpower to thrust through to every unexplored room, missing subtle cues and geographical hints along the way.

I definitely think you should play this one, because it extracts one of the cores of parser gameplay while peeling a way a lot of other things. It's a fun puzzle, but perhaps even more interesting as a very well executed abstraction.

Only kidding - completionists will probably love this game, unless they have something important to do and are on a strict deadline. In that case, put this game off until later.

The basic premise is that 130 rooms make up the Facility, and your job is to discover each and every one. At first it seems simple, until you run into the Facility's security clearance system, which only grants you access to new parts of the Facility once you've found a keycard of the corresponding color. From there, the game is a series of fetch quests and minor puzzles, but it's hilarious and cute and the characters, even though you can't interact with them outside of a very limited set of actions, are so endearing.

There's not a lot of story, at least not an overarching one. But about halfway through the game I realized that I didn't need a story, I was just eagerly waiting to fill in the next box on the paper map I was playing along with. (Don't skip out on that part - half the fun is in filling in the squares and eventually gazing down at a fully developed map.)