Nightmare Adventure

An old-school game by Laurence Emms and Vibha Laljani with a custom parser. I’ve posted a review at my blog.

This was a custom parser game written in Haskell, judging from the readme. So as you might expect, it does come across as a bit of a programming exercise, with the limited parser to match. No shortcut commands, no examine (only look at), all directions have to be preceded by GO. But it’s not too hard otherwise to figure out what it’ll accept.

I’d say it falls into a sort of fairy-tale fantasy? Fairly short. Noticed some misuse of commas and semi-colons. Descriptions could’ve been more lively – they’re more objective like older text adventures, which doesn’t quite pair with the story/setting at times – but within that style they do their job, and tell you everything you need to know.

One “bad” ending I found, immediate game over. The one puzzle at the end (well, I guess you could count another one? and tmack is counting another one in the middle too) I didn’t really get the solution for and brute-forced it (how would I know which color to choose)?

No crashes or anything, could be finished to the end without too much frustration, everything you can interact with is clearly marked with which I appreciated, and the one or two non-obvious commands are clearly communicated. Considering the custom parser (and especially if you consider that part of the work going into this), the game’s alright.