Dead Synchronicity text adventure prequel

So, uh, it doesn’t seem to have made much of an impression around here, so I thought I’d share in case people just missed it (I know I did; I’d never heard of DS, and happened to catch a post about it in CAAD).

deadsynchronicity.com/en/the-longest-night/

Dead Synchronicity has released a free prequel to its first game, which is in text adventure form. It’s platform-specific homebrew parser.

As you can expect, there are kinks with the parser. X stands for eXits, so you can forget about easily examining anything. U and D are not understood synonims for UP and DOWN. The first room says “There’s a strange sound coming from the other side of the glass clock face” and LISTEN isn’t implemented.

But hey. It exists, it’s been released, it’s out there.

And as far as I have seen it doesn’t do anything TADS or I7 couldn’t have done as well. This fascination with homebrew parsers is quite astounding.

ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=u9spdznhokhfpxng

It’s gotten into IFDB.

The review it links to is… interesting. It certainly does not mirror my own experience with the game (which has been very sparse, just enough to note the shortcomings listed above). It looks like it was written by someone who played a handful of text adventures back in the day and has fond memories of it, but knows little of where text adventures have got to today. Meaning that most people around here are likely to have very different expectations from that reviewer’s…