“Citizen of Nowhere” is a lightly comedic, parser-based game reminiscent of old-school puzzle games from the 1980s.

Gameplay: The style of the game is one familiar from games in the 1980s like Zork I or The Pawn: an emphasis in the game on puzzles, with the plot being desultory; a sprawling, crazy quilt world containing many otherwise unremarkable hallways of junctions; a juxtaposition of lazy-medieval fantasy elements (e.g., giants and ogres) with modern machinery; text that’s lightly comedic and contains several puns; and so on. It’s an interesting style game of that isn’t common anymore, and it’s refreshing to see such a different kind of game. 5/10.

Mechanics: Most of the puzzles involve gathering inventory items and using them in other places. There are some variations, though, such as the word puzzles posed by one NPC carrying a useful object. As is common in its genre, the NPCs in the game are either obstacles to be defeated or the equivalent of vending machines. 5/10.

Presentation: The light tone of the game fits is genre, and puns are rampant in the text. The text also contains many instances of missing puncutation (e.g. a missing period and line break in the response to READ LETTER) and capitalization in the text. There are some implementation issues, including the parser’s not recognizing FLAGS (as opposed to the singular FLAG) in a puzzle involving manipulating several of them, and the response to READ MAP is simply, “Fill in map description here.” There are many NPCs in the game, but none of them is particularly memorable or well-characterized. 4/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You like puns.

Score: 5