The Bibliophile

I've been playing all past Spring Thing games. Many of them are long parser games, longer than would be entered into IFComp, and this one is no exception.

It's a Lovecraftian game where you run a bookstore and need to stop someone from collecting an evil music libretto that would end the world.

The map is really large. Much of the game consists in walking across town, like from your house to your friend's house and back. It gives the city a bit more of a real feel. There are a lot of NPCs, too.

In the game you can read a book to learn spells, and randomized combat features in a couple of segments.

The storyline adheres closely to Lovecraftian ideas, incorporating things like ancient evil gods, cults, and mysteries from Africa, adhering to Lovecraft's idea of foreigners being creepy.

The game is quite long, with the walkthrough split into 9 chapters.

If there's one big deficiency, it's in providing more synonyms and descriptions. With a game this big it makes sense that things would fall through the cracks, and they do. In the last area I found people with descriptions like 'you don't see anything interesting about _____' and various items were the same. Some verbs don't have synonyms, so for a bottle of liquid SQUEEZE BOTTLE ONTO _____ works but PUT BOTTLE ON ______ doesn't.