IFComprehensive

With most parser-based games these days using a variant of Inform, it’s good to see one that tackles the difficult problem of writing a parser from scratch. “Nightmare Adventure” is a short, puzzle-oriented game reminiscent of an older generation of interactive fiction. In it, the player travels through a standard fantasy town and a more abstract oneiric landscape in order to break the magic spell that has put everyone to sleep.

Gameplay: The game is sparsely populated, and the few objects and characters that are present have limited functionality. The setting is not detailed, but it’s clear what to do throughout, and I didn’t have any trouble interacting with the NPCs or items I ran across. 4/10.

Mechanics: What makes this game unique is its custom parser. It’s functional, but it doesn’t have the functionality of even the earliest Infocom parsers. Questions (e.g., “Who is Jorryn?”) aren’t understood; abbreviations (e.g., “x door”) aren’t allowed; shortening commands like “go east” to simply “east” isn’t understood; mistyped commands like “look at parent” (as opposed to “look at parents”) are parsed as just “look”; and so on. Of course, writing a decent parser is hard, especially when you’re not paid to do it as a full-time job. It’s hard to see what the advantage is to writing one from (apparently) scratch is, though, when there are more polished ones freely available.

Despite that, the game is straightforward enough that any problems I had with the parser were easy to circumvent. There are three simple puzzles, and the game avoids a potential guess-the-verb problem with the last one by both providing a list of verbs and having one character explicitly tell the player character the correct (and entirely reasonable) syntax. 3/10.

Presentation: Descriptions throughout the game are simple and sparse. The spacing is often odd in the text, including many extraneous blank lines in the inventory listing. Objects with which the player can interact are called out in the text by brackets to distinguish them from scenery that isn’t interactive. While I personally found it to be a bit jarring, it could be a useful feature for players who are new to parser-based games or who just have a lower tolerance for unrecognized vocabulary in the parser. 3/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You’re interested in seeing a variety of parsers, particularly if you want to write a custom one yourself. You’re curious about the mechanic of noting interactive objects explicitly, and you want to see how it works in practice.

Score: 3

One of my personal frustrations with interaction fiction is that even though games in the mystery genre have been around since the early days of Infocom, it’s rare to find one that’s satisfying both as a game and as a narrative. Most works take one of three approaches: a procedural that focuses on gathering physical evidence by solving standard adventure set-piece puzzles (e.g., some of the Sherlock Holmes games); a series of dialogues that focuses on spotting contradictions in testimony (e.g., the appropriately-titled “Contradiction”, or the Danganronpa series); or a narrative that removes most of the interactive elements to focus on the underlying mystery. “Murder at the Manor” is a short, choice-based game that takes the last approach, breezing through the comfortably familiar plot of a aristocrat’s murder in interbellum England. Through a series of static pages, the player methodically investigates the corpse, searches the mansion’s four major rooms, interrogates the four suspects, examines the four potential weapons, and then decides whom to arrest.

Gameplay: There’s little actual gameplay here; the only option is choosing which pages to read in which order. There’s no interaction among them, nor are there any follow-up clues or dialogue trees to explore. Still, I’m a fan of the genre, and the mystery itself is fine; it’s just effectively a short story to read through than an interactive game. 4/10.

Mechanics: The core of the game is, of course, unraveling the murder myself itself. The solution is fair, but it’s not particularly compelling as a puzzle. Solving it is just a matter of noting the evidence and conversations earlier, without any particularly clever insight. Still, the game is short, and something elaborate would require a larger game with much more plotting and clues. Nothing impeded my progress in playing through the game, but there wasn’t much to impede. 4/10.

Presentation: The game puts great effort throughout to hit the charming tropes of a Golden Age murder mystery. The prose is a bit overwrought (going into elaborate detail about the furniture in the manor, for example), but agreeably so. There were a few typos, such as the narrator’s referring to a letter as a piece of “stationary.” The suspects were stock characters, but that’s standard in the genre (see almost everything by Agatha Christie, for example), and it shifts the focus to the abstract puzzle of the murder. Although he’s also a stock character, the investigator’s name is “Percival Pike,” and it’s hard to think of a better name for a British Golden Age detective. 6/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You want to read a quick, light murder mystery.

Score: 5