A quiet evening at home

I have not seen one of these in a long time: a basic implementation of someone's living quarters. That sort of thing usually means that this is a "teach yourself the programming language" game. Not that I have any objection, per se, to either: an apartment implementation in the hands of a master can be impressive (see "Shade") and I myself have entered a "teach yourself..." game twice in the competition ... coming in second both times.

But the thing that lifts the apartment game and the "teach yourself" game out of the muck is the author's ideas on where to go from there, what to do with the tools at hand. In this case, I'm afraid that the results are a little bland. We are not presented with anything that we might not already experience on a day-to-day basis, outside of the game, and nothing particularly new or insightful is said about these activities. There is little point.

With regard to the puzzles, they are mostly quite simple. The puzzle involving the location of the can opener was unintuitive: the player has no reason to think that exercising the hamster would help him find the opener, nor does he have any reason to want to exercise the hamster. Either one of these two things would have been sufficient.

The author has so far shown himself to be a competent coder. He has familiarised himself with the ins and outs of how to create various effects and situations and simple puzzles in the game. What he needs now is a real story, something to say with what he has learnt.

Oatmeal, no sugar or honey, and water.