Homeland by Jason Self

This one’s definitely an introduction; I scored six out of seven possible points. That’s right, scored – this one’s definitely a game. What we have here is a throwback to the classic, puzzley style of parser IF with enough references to let us know this will probably be an homage to the old-school. The writing tone – like the game itself is fairly sparse and straightforward, revealing the author’s apparent fascination with colors and the descriptions thereof. There’s a subtle, but fairly easy to deduce hinting mechanism which I found to be alternately either useful and clever or frustrating and annoying as well as a built-in hint system (type “help”), which should be helpful to beginners.

There’s not much to say here, really. This very short introduction doesn’t really give us much in the way of story – other than a mystery which needs to be solved for the usual “this is a game and if there’s a mystery, it needs to be solved” reason, so it’s hard to say where the author is headed. I did look at the source code for the game and while it doesn’t look like there was a seventh point (… yet!) there was a location which I never visited. This one has plenty more work to be done to even approach the Zorkian heights to which it aspires.

Here’s the thing with these types of adventures: they need a ton of beta testing from a bunch of different players. Puzzles are strange – ­ones that are obvious to some can be baffling to others. Also – and I can’t stress this enough [note: don’t use Twitter memes here] – it is important for identifying the myriad ways players will try to phrase the same solution. There are things about classic IF that some players still love; guess the verb and / or noun is not one of them.

As they say, “Don’t complain about the coffee unless you want to be the one who gets to make it,” so I hereby publically (if you count announcing on a blog which has been read by exactly four people so far “publically”) volunteer to beta test a completed version of this game (after IF comp is finished and a suitable decompression period has elapsed, of course).

– BP

P.S. – Jason, my transcript’s in the mail.