#ifcomp 2025

This is a hard game to review, in part because it's a long-term cri de cœur project, in part because it's by a new author, and in part because I'm definitely not in the target audience in multiple ways. So I suppose really the only way to review this fairly is to try to talk about its salient features as a piece of fiction and a game, looking at what it tries to do and how successful it is at doing so.

So: I take it that Pure - Part 1 is a non-subtle allegory for identity difficulties experienced by a transgender individual. (To say that it is not subtle is an observation, not a criticism. Allegories need not be subtle to be effective. This is not, and that is not a weakness with the piece.) It takes the general form of part (the first part, presumably) of a sort of Hero's Journey through identity and body alteration, told in a body-horror-forward way that wouldn't be unfamiliar to those who have read Clive Barker or paid attention to H.R. Giger. So this first part of the story takes the PC through a dungeon, down to its depths, while the PC's body rots and they learn, with the help of an infinitely supportive partner, to learn to love who they are.

So it's an uncomfortable narrative on the face of it, and it's clearly supposed to be uncomfortable: no writer works in body horror to give their readers metaphorical backrubs. There's a lot that can be said about horror as generally uncomfortable, and I've said some of it in front of groups of students in the past, but it's worth pointing out that one of the things that tends to distinguish horror (in general, I mean, and not simply and specifically talking about body horror here) from other genres is that horror frequently rejects—often quite emphatically—the idea that the person experiencing the narrative is doing so out of a desire to identify with the protagonist's life and experiences: no one wants to be the victim in a slasher film, for instance. This particular difference from other genres frequently leads to misunderstandings of those who voluntarily consume horror narratives by those who don't—people who can only understand encountering consumption via the assumption that the view must be finding a character to joyfully identify with get stuck on the logical conclusion of that idea: if the viewer of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre isn't identifying with one of the women being murdered (and who would want to do that?), then they (clearly!) must be identifying with the psycho wielding the chainsaw!

So goes the theory, anyway. Of course this is a simplistic way to understand encountering a narrative, and there are plenty of examples of narratives outside of the horror genre where it makes absolutely no sense; probably this is most commonly and obviously true in the case of tragedy: which character's fate do you want to share when you see Hamlet? Were the ancient Greeks who saw a performance of Oedipus Rex secretly getting their impulse to blind themselves gratified? Can one be a feminist at a performance of Hedda Gabler, or is that possibility necessarily foreclosed by the joy one must be taking in Hedda's suicide?

Of course all of this is complete nonsense; there are many reasons to experience a narrative besides compensating for a joyless existence by identifying with an imaginary character who lives a more meaningful life: Aristotle spent some time writing about this. So a narrative can provide satisfaction by, as Aristotle suggested, provoking catharsis. We might also note that someone might read or watch or play a story because it explores an issue that they find important; or because the narrative itself provides pleasure in some way besides simply identifying with one or another character in it; or because the narrative teaches a moral lesson, or a skill, or a secret encrypted piece of information; or because familiarity with even the unpleasant works of a genre helps to teach the genre itself, and its conventions; or for any number of other reasons, really.

Which does not get us any closer to understanding what the narrative of Pure accomplishes; that was a long-winded digression intended to circumvent a specific common barrier to meaningful interpretation. I take it to be largely cathartic, a discharge of the kind of stress that accumulates from being in insoluble double-binds and other kinds of dilemmas. The cathartic discharge happens as the protagonist passes through a symbolic version of their own history, presuppositions, culture, experiences, identity, breaking down all of these things with the help of the accompanying partner and the two accompanying guards, as their identity and body are reconfigured.

All of this is, well, a horrifying experience, and it's hard to imagine this basic story being recast as, say, a lighthearted comedy while still being effective in the same register. This is in some ways quite an effective piece, and I don't have to have a direct point of contact with the author's experience of gender identity to see that or to experience it as an effective narrative. Where I think it falls flat, in some ways, is as an effective piece of parser IF.

Part of this is simply that it's not clear that it is in fact meant to be a piece of parser-based interactive fiction: the world is often so thinly implemented and so constrained that it feels very much like a CYOA novel. For instance:

>x door An iron door that looks like it was forged from dozens of pieces of scrap. It has a patchwork look to it. A black, sticky liquid is seeping from between the panels. The Eagle catches your eye for a moment. A disgusted curling of his lips betrays his mask of passivity before he looks away again. >open door An iron door that looks like it was forged from dozens of pieces of scrap. It has a patchwork look to it. A black, sticky liquid is seeping from between the panels. The Eagle bends down and runs a gauntleted finger along the stones on the floor.

The author's intent is clear—prevent the PC from doing anything with the door until the puzzle that holds the door closed is solved, thereby gatekeeping access to the next room—but the mechanism, simply redirecting all (or many?) actions to LOOK doesn't work well; it breaks the illusion of agency on which parser IF generally depends. There's an argument to be made, I think, that this break in the illusion of agency has something meaningful to say about the way that trans people experience agency over their own bodies in the first place, especially in our current contentious political climate; and in fact there's a gesture in this direction in the ABOUT text:

For cisgender players who want the most out of their gameplay experience, I encourage them to consider a lived experience in which bodily autonomy is often subjective regarding how much personal power you have.

But I think that, for this to be effective, it would need to be developed more explicitly in the game mechanics themselves, and not merely provided in an optional notice that many people will have forgotten by the time the action redirection is noticed and feels like a coding error. There are other spots of rough implementation that feel the same way. With all of the restrictions on what actions are possible and which options are supported, this feels very much like it wanted to be a piece of choice-based fiction rather than a piece of parser IF. There is also a series of other basic coding problems that deserves cleanup: missing spacing, missing periods at the end of sentences, errors in understanding how and when Inform translates single quotes in the source into double quotes in the game. This is largely a matter of polish, of course, but it adds up after a while, and, in the final analysis, polish matters.

But all in all—and despite the occasional wish for the prose to be tightened—this is quite effective as a story, even if it's not always successful as a piece of interactive fiction, and I think it'll stick with me for a long time. I suppose I'll probably play the follow-ups when they come out.

(My rating: 5/10. I also drew a map of the game's geography as I played.)

Having just recently re-watched all of the Alien movies, I've been thinking about what Dan O'Bannon said about a writing decision he made when he was writing the script for the original movie in the sequence, a comment whose substance which boils down to "You know how you can come into a movie ten minutes late and miss the initial setup but still get into the film and figure it out well enough to enjoy the rest of the movie? When I couldn't figure out how to set up the basic premise for the movie, I decided to just 'come late' to Alien, and let the audience pick up on the backstory as necessary during the rest of the film." (What O'Bannon actually said was substantially more pithy, but I've been skimming through the special features on my Alien DVD looking for the quote for most of an hour now, and Dan O'Bannon is onscreen a lot, so you're going to have to put up with my loquacious summary here, sorry.) In any case, Alien's setup works pretty well: you don't know exactly how the Nostromo came to be hauling several million tons of ore through space. You don't know where they are, even approximately, relative to our own solar system. You don't know how the labor dispute between the lower-paid and higher-paid crew members came to be, or exactly what's at stake. All you really know is that they're suddenly woken up while the ship is in transit, and you see how whatever their original mission is gradually goes horribly wrong, and you find out a great deal about why; but you never get the initial setup.

Anyway, Monkeys and Car Keys has a similar basic setup: it's not clear why you're passing through the jungle. You don't know why the PC decided to take a short walk. You don't know how they came to get lost for most of a day while on that short walk. You don't even know where on Earth this particular bit of jungle is. All you know is that, as you finally approach your car, ready to continue on your journey to wherever, you discover that your car has been ransacked by some of the monkeys in the local jungle, and you see one of them running away with they keys without which you can't start your car and leave.

So you need to find your keys, and the game is a sequence of puzzles that the PC needs to solve in order to get those car keys back and be on your way. There are three major puzzles, each with subcomponents, all largely monkey-focused, none easy but none terribly difficult, either. There are an awful lot of references to monkey- or ape-related media and proverbs: Donkey Kong; King Kong; "monkey see, monkey do"; "more fun than a barrel of monkeys"; and the "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" monkeys all get a substantial nod in plot and/or puzzle design at some point in the game. It's more than a little funny, and the puzzles unfold rather naturally, for the most part, from the plot. Each of the puzzles requires a basic insight and then has a phase where the implementation has to be worked out, and I think it's all basically fair.

The hardest puzzle, I think, is the second, where you need to get a monkey watching you to mirror your own actions so that you are effectively working together to solve a problem (constructing a bridge over a chasm from opposite sides of that chasm). There are a number of rough edges here: you need to have found your missing (stolen by monkeys, in fact) glasses to begin working on the puzzle meaningfully, but they're quite easy to miss; and there's another item you have to have obtained; and you need to have figured out that the monkey would benefit from being given your glasses; and you have to figure out a moderately fiddly order of operations to engage in; and you have to have figured out that the monkey is willing to help you from the fact that her name is a pun. That's quite a list of requirements, and the game doesn't really nudge you usefully on several items on that list. When you do finally start working out the puzzle solution, it feels more like a physical puzzle where you have to work with a doppelgänger to accomplish things in a graphical adventure game (say, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past) than it feels like a piece of parser IF.

But the hints and walkthrough helped me through the tougher sections of this puzzle, and I didn't need it elsewhere, so I count this game as being a rather successful puzzler on its own terms. What I wanted from it is simply more game: more puzzles, a better opportunity to explore this lost city that the game puts you at the edge of, a larger set of opportunities to play with the translation mechanics that the game offers you in the first part (and again, briefly, at the end).

But being left wanting more is no fault in a game, and I hope there are more fun puzzly games like this in the near future. This was a fun way to spend an evening.

(My rating: 7/10. I also drew a map of the game's geography as I played.)

I feel like I'm saying "I haven't played the preceding game in the series, but ..." a lot this Comp. And, again: I haven't played the preceding Anastasia the Power Pony game from 2022's Comp, because I wasn't around for 2022's Comp. Sigh. But this game didn't lean too much on its predecessor's plot.

It's a game about a detective who's a semi-anthropomorphic horse who's also a kung-fu master is a silly concept, but it leans right into it and plays it to the hilt. It's more Bojack Horseman than My Little Pony, what with a world full of other semi-anthropomorphic animals, and the task in this game, apparently continued from the previous adventure, is to investigate and take down a sinister gang of llamas who are running a weapons smuggling ring/bad buffet restaurant. If the authorial sincerity had faltered even a little bit, the whole structure would have collapsed; but the steadfast refusal to acknowledge that there even is a bit at play wins out overall. It was a lot of fun.

I'm not generally a fan of combat in parser IF, but it's hard to make a kung-fu game without it, and this game does it well by not making it visibly RPG-like, with hit points and damage, but instead treating it as a puzzle: how do I block this punch, how can I take down the pastry chef in the restaurant throwing pies at me, how do I master this kung-fu technique that my master is is trying to show me? It's a relatively innovative system and the game itself is quite forgiving, offering guidance in multiple different ways and giving you the chance to retry failed rounds of combat, so there's only so much pressure even in the most heated of action sequences.

I think what I most wanted from this game is more, which is a good place to leave the player in: I felt like the combat system had really just been fully introduced when the game came to its climactic scene, and the individual episodes would have benefited from being even more developed, I think. The warehouse section in particular: after all that effort sneaking into the warehouse, finding what I was looking for almost immediately felt weirdly unbalanced. I wanted a big new chunk of map to explore, not just two mostly empty rooms.

Another difficulty: there were some implementation problems. I imagine this is because the pun-based kung-fu system requires digging deep into the parser in a number of different ways to enforce the requirement that you have to word your command in an appropriately punny way, but it led to weird error messages in a few places:

> x box A large, greenish box, a little over half your height at the withers, that seems to be some kind of power station or generator. (You're not an electrician.) By the light of a green bulb on the top, you can see the outline of an access panel. A bundle of cables connects it to the wall of the warehouse. It is currently northeast of the warehouse. > x panel An access panel in the front of the station, featureless except for a keyhole on the right.

It is currently northeast of the warehouse. > x keyhole Which do you mean, the access panel or the lock? access panel An access panel in the front of the station, featureless except for a keyhole on the right. It is currently northeast of the warehouse. > x keyhole Which do you mean, the access panel or the lock? lock What do you want to lock? x lock keyhole Which do you mean, the access panel or the lock? lock What do you want to lock?

And also:

> unlock padlock You must supply a second noun. A brilliant flash of lightning silhouettes everything around you in an electric white glow! It takes a few seconds for your vision to clear. > unlock padlock with key You can't reach the lock, by the gate, from where you are to the truck lot. > s The key fits the lock perfectly. It takes a little effort, but you unlock the gate and push it open. Your hoof lands in a puddle with a quiet splash. There's a rumble like a drum roll and then a loud thunderclap.

There were a few others along the way. Mostly the were minor, but a serious annoyance during the climactic "food fight" scene was that the parser kept listing food items, which were weapons for the fight, in their initial location, even when the llamas had already thrown them, which made it frustrating to try to find something to throw.

I think the larger problem with the food fight scene is just that there were so many unsupported puns that I tried; the possibility space for puns with food in that scene is of course enormous, but that's a problem the author has no one else to blame for, and it's frustrating to think of a devastating pun only to have the parser not recognize it.

But all in all, this was a fantastic entry, and I'm glad I got to play it -- looks like I've got another game to put on my to-play list for after the Comp.

(My rating: 7/10. I also drew a map of the game's geography as I played.)

I have not played Riley's previous Galaxy Jones story, but the Comp blurb said it wasn't necessary; and I found that to be true. I did play (and quite enjoy) Riley's Bureau of Strange Happenings this year, which means I've been looking forward to this one for most of the Comp now. This was not much like BOSH: a much smaller map (14 locations as opposed to 100+ in Bureau), a lot more integrated and polished, but without the strange glorious luxuriant effusive hothouse weirdness that I so much enjoyed in BOSH. Ah well, last year I said I wished that BOSH were more polished and integrated; and now Riley has written a polished and integrated game and I find myself pining for the "I crammed nine berjillion different ideas into this game, and they mostly work pretty well" approach that last year's game took. It seems there is no pleasing me.

I jest, of course; this was in fact quite a pleasing game in many ways, even if it's more constrained than last year's offering. You play Galaxy Jones, pulp sci-fi superheroine extraordinaire; you are on a mission to prevent a splinter group of radical aliens from plunging Mars's moon Phobos directly into Mars and killing many people! Oh no! This is a good premise for pulp sci-fi with a superhero (or superheroine), and Riley really plays it to the hilt. The writing is spot-on throughout, I think; purple and pulpy and gloriously effusive in the introductory text and in the action sequences, but it mostly gets out of the way when you're exploring the moon-base (the ... Phobos-base?) and trying to prevent the aliens from turning Phobos into a giant missile that collides with its primary body. Still, even when Riley's not hamming it up, the writing is polished and the Jones's comic-book-style narrative voice is prominent. (More than anything, what it made me think of while playing was some of the holodeck episodes from Star Trek: Voyager, especially "Bride of Chaotica!," which I tend to think is one of the better holodeck episodes from an underappreciated Star Trek series.)

The puzzles here were not really my jam; there are a series of "hack the computer chip to get this lock to open" puzzles, not unlike those in Arthur DiBianca's Operative Nine, also in this year's IFComp; all of the puzzles are logic puzzles; none was particularly difficult, but neither did I feel any real joy at solving them. (In one case I skipped a puzzle because it seemed fiddly; the game gives you the chance to smash through doors instead of hacking them open if you want to, at the cost of one point off of your score per puzzle skipped. I appreciate being given the option.)

So the plot is straightforward, the writing is pleasant and often funny, and it feels, all in all, more like a vignette from a larger story than a story on its own. I liked it, and it makes me want to go back and play the previous Galaxy Jones game, which I'm adding to my to-play list right now.

Have you ever read enthusiastic poetry by a middle-schooler who's just starting to wrap their head around the concept of poetry but who hasn't yet read a lot of poetry, or thought deeply about it, or even written much poetry yet? Someone who's really enthusiastic about the possibilities of poetic form but who doesn't yet have control over their composition in a way that makes it worthwhile to write their ideas down in a poetic form? Someone's seventh poem ever, where the rhythm is painfully awkward in places and then, in the fourth stanza, out of nowhere, purely in order to make a rhyme work, the author suddenly introduces a character named Blorange?

That's kind of what this feels like. The author's enthusiasm for the possibilities of parser-based interactive fiction is palpable. The basic idea—that you're a hipster influencer trying to win a photography exhibition requiring use of a film-based camera, and you're exploring an abandoned train tunnel to try to take winning photographs—is a really good idea! And some of the sub-ideas that are used while implementing it are also good!

But the implementation wasn't worked out with care, and the rough edges are showing:

Train Car 7244 Another musty train car. You see a small face peering at you between the rows of empty seats. A child? Down here? You see she's wearing a grubby t-shirt with "lily" embroidered on the front. Maybe she lives down here, you think to yourself in horror. There appears to be an emergency hatch above you. To the east leads out into the tunnel, and to the west is the rest of the train. You can see an escape hatch, Lily, an overhead luggage rack (closed), an underseat shadows, a maintenance panel (closed) and a hook here.

The miscellaneous, unordered collection of things you can see is bad enough, but showing the "underseat shadows" container this way gives away the fact that you're of course going to be searching it later. And it's weird that you don't seem to spend any time worrying about why there's an unsupervised six-year-old girl in an abandoned train tunnel. (The ending hand-waves this a bit, but the PC's lack of concern during the game feels very, very odd.)

Character motivation is also paper-thin in this game, both for the PC and for NPCs. Several of the NPCs have thin implementation hand-waved as "just being crazy" (notably Barry and, well, Crazy Rat Man) as far as their motivation goes, but the PC's motivation is not worked out well, either, and you spend an awful lot of time with him. To take one example: an early puzzle involves you obtaining a key card from a police officer who has snuck down into the tunnel to nap on the clock. When you first encounter the cop, the card is visible, but the PC refuses to take it, saying you should get permission. You must then wake up the cop, talk to him, and get him to go back to sleep, after which you can steal the card without permission. What was the point of that exercise? Similarly, even if you see the solution to the puzzle immediately, you cannot get Lily her stuffed toy bunny until you've gone through an entire song and dance that requires checking everywhere it might possibly be (this includes searching the "underseat shadows" item mentioned above, but not just doing that).

Puzzles are, in general, quite simple, and mostly obvious: if there's a hook, you need to tie a rope to it. If there's a lock, you need to find a key. There are no real surprises, and nothing really requires lateral thinking, though the occasional flash of insight is helpful. (An annoyance: when you finally get the key card that lets you finish the game, you have to slog back across literally the entire map to get to the point furthest away from the room where the key card is located. In a game with 20 locations, you have to pass through 16 of them on your way out.) The writing is also not particularly polished, and I feel like spending some time really making everything shine in that department would really pay off for the game.

So I don't know. There's a kernel of an interesting idea here, and I do appreciate the enthusiasm for the format, but gosh, there's a lot of work left to be done to make this a satisfying game.

This one was really something. I had been starting to think "Where are the big-map puzzlefests this year?" to myself over the last few games I played, which is no poor reflection on them; and, well, here is a big-map (around 70 rooms) game with, by any reasonable count, several dozen interlocking puzzles. I spent way too long banging my head against them this last week, and I loved every minute of it.

You're a dog, which is a great initial premise; not only that, but you're a dog in the late days of the Bronze-Age Hittite empire, in a world where magic is an everyday fact of life, you're owned by a village wise-woman who takes advantage of the fact that dogs are believed to be able to absorb and transport magic. (Much of the game is clearly very carefully researched, and the optional footnotes that the game offers are a real delight, informative without being obtrusive, and always interesting.) The inciting premise of the game is that you have to figure out how to remove a curse that has been placed on your owner; normally, she is the one to remove curses, but since the curse is on her, she's out of action.

The early part of the game focuses on learning the mechanics of how spells get moved around, what they can be applied to, and how they affect you while you're carrying them; there are a series of relative easy puzzles to get the player through this, and it all goes pretty smoothly at the beginning. There are numerous sub-goals along the way: in the first half of the game, the PC needs to take his human's place in helping to get the tributary offerings transported to the capital for tax day, each of which is a specific problem motivating exploration and magic use; the second half, mostly in the capital, is basically a treasure hunt while the PC tries to earn enough money to help him buy equipment that makes more advanced magic-use possible so that new problems (and a few remaining open problems from the early part of the game) can be solved.

All of the puzzles are fair, although a few are quite difficult; there's a built-in hint system (with the THINK verb) that gracefully directs you toward things you've missed and open problems that are currently solveable, and there's also a map in the status area of the screen that provides hints about which open problems can currently be addressed. If that sounds too coddly, it can all be disabled in-game, but I found that I only needed to consult it occasionally and it wasn't too pushy. (There is a bit of in-game intro text of the "if you've never played parser IF, here are some general suggestions" type that I wish could be easily disabled, and there is occasional "gosh, you're looking at the footnotes a lot; don't worry, you can always look at them later" reminder that I wish had been just a little less aggressive; but these are fine-tuning issues with what I think is basically a good idea that is mostly executed quite well.)

For those problems that are very difficult, Stelzer provides a set of Invisiclues-style hints that are very detailed and give gradual hints without immediately giving the whole solution away; I occasionally glanced at them when I found a problem intractable, and I mostly found that the first hint or two in the sequence for a problem was all I needed to see to understand how to solve it. For those problems were I did need to read the whole thing, it was always more or less good enough (although the "get the bowl from the soldiers" problem was fiddly enough that I wanted the last clue to be just a tiny bit more explicit, because I must have tried to pull of the solution I basically understood nearly a dozen times before I managed to actually pull it off). Similarly, there's a bonus problem that I would not have solved without simply looking at the solution: it's objectively fair, but quite hard, as the hints warn from the very beginning.

I think what most sells this particular game is the depth and richness of the world, and the way that it's introduced gracefully, without info-dumping, gradually, through the course of normal gameplay. It might have been awkward and annoying in any number of ways—for instance, many of the puzzles boil down to being basically inventory-management puzzles with a very small inventory limit, which I tend to find tedious and annoying. Not here, though: the inventory limits make sense, the parameters of magic usage make sense, the puzzle constraints always have a believable in-world solution. Like the very best parser IF puzzles, the more difficult problems tended to get solved accidentally, at the back of my brain, while I was away from the laptop I was playing the game on and doing something else, not even thinking about it: the pieces just clicked into place and I thought, oh, of course, if you just .... and that was it. The puzzle made sense and the solution was obvious, almost without exception.

So this was quite a game, and I really enjoyed spending most of a week on it. Daniel Stelzer's last two IFComp games were fun, polished pieces, too, but this is the best I've seen yet.

(My rating: 9/10. I also drew a map of the game's geography as I played.)

Well this was just an absolute delight to play. I really enjoyed a previous Wakes game in the same series, Who Iced Mayor McFreeze? from the 2023 IFComp, and this was good in the same ways, but (I think) more polished. It's a noir detective story set in the fictional "Sugar City," a Candyland-style world: character names include Officer Bagel, Jelle Bean (an accountant), Candy Kane (who runs a strip club), Father Wafer (a Catholic priest), Wax Lips (a prostitute), etc. etc. etc. Rain is syrup; the river is cola; there is a reference to Big Rock Candy Mountain, where your mentor, Big Red, plans to retire. It's a ridiculous concept, but Wakes makes it work by running with it and playing it entirely straight-faced throughout. The simple gambit of never acknowledging that it's ridiculous makes it work surprisingly well; it's also noteworthy that Wakes just absolutely nails the noir voicing and diction that other games that have tried to work in the genre don't get nearly as well as he does.

This is a bigger world than Mayor McFreeze, which took place entirely in the factory where the mayor met his demise; here, you're getting a chance to explore a church, part of the abandoned factory, the docks, a strip club and adult bookstore, and several other parts of the dying town. There's also an exciting high-speed car chase with a hired hitman shooting at you; it's one of the more interesting puzzles in a game with multiple well-developed puzzles to chew on The maps is, overall, still pretty tight (only 19 rooms), but there's an awful lot of world-building packed in there, in part because the conversation options for the NPCs are so rich; there are of course always additional topics you wish you could ASK about, but that's a never-ending problem and Wakes has really done quite a good job here.

There's really nothing to complain about on this one: the implementation was solid, the game appropriately judged when to nudge me in the right direction, the writing was top-notch, the puzzles were fun, the world-building and characterization were excellent. (I could point out that the Demerara Street Rooftops location needs a printed name that doesn't include underscores, but that's the kind of quibbling I'd have to resort to to find complaints.)

I hope there are more Bubble Gumshoe mysteries in the future (I've just discovered that there's a 2022 episode that I missed, and I'm putting that on my to-play list right now; but that's not the same as there being more in the future, of course). It's a good concept and Wakes really knows how to milk it. This is hands-down my personal favorite game in the Comp so far.

(My rating: 8/10. I also drew a map of the game's geography as I played.)