Like a Sky Full of Locusts

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).