The Hunt for Relief

You have to use the bathroom. Eventually, you do.

That's pretty much the whole story of this piece, which, although it didn't center around potty humor as I had feared, offers little in the way of interesting gameplay.

This work is probably best considered as a companion piece for Michael J. Coyne's list of "First-Timer Foibles." It handily illustrates many of them, including synonym sickness, aberrant articles, oral offenses, shocking spelling and grisly grammar, laconic locations, and action abortion.

As a program, this piece is mostly functional, but is close to broken at several points. I encountered a number of apparent bugs, one of which mercifully allowed advancement of the "plot" without what I would assume was intended to be a critical item(Spoiler - click to show), unless, of course, boiling water in a rusty pot is supposed to magically make glue.

Upon reflection, it is clear that the author was actually trying here; you can sense his struggle to learn Inform 6 in the design of the puzzles, such as they are. Presumably, the end result was the best he could do at the time. According to IFDB, it's been ten years since this piece was released, so there's a very good chance that the author's skill as a writer and programmer have substantially increased.

New voices are always welcome in IF, so, if you're still out there, Mr. Gaertner, why not give it another try?