Camelot Jack

The name Camelot Jack brings up, perhaps, President John F Kennedy for those of us who live in america. It's a good solid title without that, because we have an idea of what fairy tales get mashed up, namely Jack and the Beanstalk and Camelot with King Arthur. But unfortunately, the homebrew parser gets in the way of the author's ideas, and we're left with some minor laughs about how the author had trouble getting stuff done, and they try their best, really, but things never take off, even if the puzzles presented are a nice short jaunt to try and leave a prison. The author seems to have gotten the scope right, but CJ isn't really a good fit for the competition, as it feels more like "my first parser game as an author" than "let me help you play your first parser game."

The layout is impressive, with buttons to push for common parser commands. And having Swordy, your sword, help you along in the all-too-brief tutorial helps to not take things too seriously and forgive some rough bits. But it's also hard to do simple things like take inventory or even go north. While clear GUI is nice, though, CJ doesn't understand abbreviations like I for Inventory. NORTH gives "I know not this north of which you speak." So the humor does try a bit too hard.

Nevertheless, sitting down with a walkthrough and going through (going off course may make the game unwinnable,) provides a smile or two, and by the end, you see what the author was getting at, but it could probably have used more testing. You probably know what to do with cheese if you've been an adventure before, so that's good for beginners, and there's a neat little main puzzle where you have to choose between three trapped containers, and one item that didn't seem handy comes in handy, and it makes sense, and you feel clever outsmarting an NPC. This is something to build on. Once you win, you don't really win, but you get a message that the author had hoped to do more. They definitely can one day, as the GUI is impressive here and shows the author knows what he's doing, but the competition really isn't focused on that sort of convenience.