Alphabet City

This game is very buggy and at least some of the room descriptions were written using ChatGPT. Still, it's a very characterful romp invoking a specific time and place and kind of social scene, and for all its many rough edges in implementation, the game is not hard to interact with and have an amusing experience.

Alphabet City is full of grime and grunge. The place just reeks of poverty, decay, desperation. You are all to familiar with the bottom, but things were starting to look up. But now your girl is missing, and you want to find her, and take her back home. All in all, this game has a good premise, great setting, interesting writing, but needs a lot more testing. This could really have been one of the best games of ParserComp if more work were put in on the parser responses to prevent some of the silliness that happens with Inform 7 objects that aren't classified correctly. I really dig the artwork that was included that really sets the tone for this story. Would definitely like to see a version 2 of this released that fixes some of the issues and perhaps adds a bit more to the story. I am giving 2/5 because for me that means a game with potential that has serious problems. That's what I feel Alphabet City is, a game with a lot of potential, but it needs some major work to pass as an enjoyable game I could recommend.

This parser game is the author’s first Inform 7 game, but is set in a larger series of Alphabet City games.

It’s pretty heavy stuff. Our hero is a recovering cocaine user who had a huge fight with his girlfriend over her refusal to quit using drugs. A torn earring is all that remains of the fight.

The game implements a chunk of New York City, including the weed-filled offices of the magazine our protagonist works for and a night club.

While you can beat the game without it, fighting is a way you can interact with a couple of people. FIGHT ____ or HIT ____ starts combat which you can continue until one person perishes. It’s also usable against (Spoiler - click to show)your girlfriend, surprisingly, although the game converts it to (Spoiler - click to show)LOVE.

The descriptions are vivid and raw, depicting a grungy life. I thought that the descriptiveness was well done. And there’s some fancy highlighting of keywords.

Some of the scenery is underimplemented in ways all too familiar to those who have started Inform 7 (I have done them many times). Things like objects whose names are subsets of each other (in this case ‘key’ and ‘studio key’) and so can’t be referred to easily; takable things that shouldn’t be takable; and objects just listed in a pile at the end of a paragraph instead of including them more discreetly in earlier paragraphs.

(to new authors: if you put the name of an object in brackets like [chair] in a room description, it won’t show up later on. Or, saying something like ‘the chair is scenery’ makes the chair not appear in the list at the end and keeps people from taking it. And finally after you define an object, if your next sentence is in quotese that becomes the ‘fancy’ way to see the object. Like:

The knife is on the table. “The knife you used to make your sandwich is still on the table, dirty.”

Then when the game runs, instead of saying ‘You also see a knife’. It will say “The knife you used to make your sandwich is still on the table, dirty.”)

I think this author has a lot of potential, and I think this game could be pretty great if it had some more polish, so I definitely encourage more experimentation, beta testing, and authoring. Good work!