CurseOfTheManor.xls

This is my entry for the Neo-Interactives anti-productivity jam. The challenge was to create a work of interactive fiction using office productivity software or other software not normally suited to the task of creating IF.

The obvious way to make a parser-based adventure in Excel would be to use macros. But Excel makes you click through so many ominous warnings before you can run macros in a downloaded spreadsheet that I figured no-one would ever play it. So the game is simply made with formulas. An awful lot of convoluted formulas.

You need a relatively recent version of Excel for this to work. It definitely won't work with Excel 2019 or earlier because they lack dynamic array formulas. It also won't work in Google Sheets or LibreOffice. If the response to every command is "I don't know that verb", your Excel version is too old.