Past Tense

SynTax

Typing hint will bring up little bits of info, there are also footnotes which you have access to for further clues. A beginner will find this feature very useful. Sometimes you are told you don't have something, but on accessing the Inventory shows that you have it. This was very annoying and frustrating, in places the spelling is a bit off.

Baf's Guide

This is not a complete game. It isn't even a complete demo. You can play it for about a half an hour until the point where the Unlikely Hero recovers the ampoule of Secret Formula from the Evil Genius's Laboratory, but then you run out of things to do and the game doesn't bother ending. There is one interesting thing about it, though: you can toggle the tense. Everything is in the past tense by default, but you can change it to present tense at will. If you want to see how to do that kind of thing in TADS, check out the source code. Beyond that, it's a fairly typical, if truncated, puzzle game.

-- Carl Muckenhoupt