Like a Sky Full of Locusts

This game is set in the world of Castle Balderstone, but is a standalone entry as opposed to the large anthologies usually found with Castle Balderstone.

It's a western, a genre of IF I enjoy as it traditionally wasn't very common (although more have popped up recently!) (although now that I think of it it's set on a military base, so it doesn't have to be a western, but it has western themes kind of, like a solo hero with a gun, musical elements, a jail with a single cell, etc.)

The idea is that literal hell on earth has appeared at a military base, and monsters roam around. You have a pistol and can acquire more weapons.

Most of the gameplay for me was finding demons and then shooting them a lot. There's a little bit more (like puzzles) but I found that the main appeal of this game was the overall aesthetic, with the mechanics mostly serving as a way to flavor your experience of the aesthetic. In that way, it resembles Winter Storm Draco and The Ascent of the Gothic Tower out of Ryan Veeder's other works.

I enjoyed the writing and its demons, and the excruciating moral quandary that our hero encounters in the final verse.

Like a Sky Full of Locusts is a western/monster-y parser game in which you play as an Army man in the Far West, whose tale is derived from the titular epic presented by Rattlesnake Yates at the Castle Balderstone Horror Convention in 1969. Returning to the Fort after some unexplained adventure, you find it in disarray, and crawling with monsters. Simple man of arms that you are, you shoot them until they perish/disappear. There's one major puzzle to unlock the final scene, but as the *hint* command indicates: just explore and shoot.

The most trouble I had, while playing, was finding the glyphs. While most where in plain sight, a couple were hidden behind descriptions (so I went around the map maybe 4-5 times before finding them all. But that's essentially my fault for not drawing a map from the start. I was a bit anxious looking at the bullets in my inventory (knowing shooters, it's always an issue), but was pleasantly surprised that you don't ever run out ((Spoiler - click to show)I don't think I even used any of the other guns available, and still got to the end unscathed) because the game provides and doesn't let you waste the bullets anyway.

There's another layer, wrapped around the game, in which we are only privy to by being a guest to the convention, listening to Yates's epic poems (of which we get snippets through the game, the amount of rhyming is pretty impressive), or the other participants' criticism of the poetic tale. This entry being essentially my introduction to the Castle Balderstone anthology, that whole section after the first end kinda went over my head.
However, if I were able to add to the other authors' criticism, I wouldn't have minded having the choice to (Spoiler - click to show)decide the face of the Colonel, as the whole mess is essentially his fault, and honestly, considering the damage he'd done in the Fort, doesn't really deserve being saved just before the end.

Overall, a pretty engaging parser, even with the limited agency you can have, with an intriguing framing (story within a story).

A return to the weird world of Castle Balderstone. Specifically, the "weird west" world, in this cowboy horror where the protagonist packs heat to take on a demonic invasion of a frontier town. It's a shoot-em-up with trivial levels of puzzle difficulty: the only real challenge is equipping the right gun for the right enemy (and maybe preserving ammo, but it almost grows on trees in this game). But this is story-focused IF, and the most important element, the writing, easily carries this to greatness: you can almost taste the sawdust and spittoons. And there are multiple, impressively lengthy bits done entirely in rhyming verse. Yee-haw!