Inside the Facility

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.

This is largely a treasure hunt style game where you must determine where to take your current item, though there are also more complicated puzzles. It takes place in a sci-fi research facility with teleportation rooms and invisibility labs and amusing NPCs.

My only complaint is that the navigation starts to get tedious after a while as the map keeps getting larger. My ideas for dealing with this would be: include a "go to" command; include a graphical interactive map in the game; use a smaller map and reuse the rooms more.

The only commands in this game are moving, looking at the room description, checking your inventory, and waiting. The fact that you can't inspect things more closely or take objects that seem useful can be frustrating when you're used to having more control, but it's somehow funny to passively infiltrate this facility by simply wandering around. I definitely recommend making yourself a map-- something I pretty much never do, but this game practically requires it.