Dead Hotel

This was an engine with potential, but without much of a story to go with it. It's not quite CYOA: it's really more like your standard freeform interactive fiction, but with all your available immediate actions listed at each prompt. It's like the LucasArts system cut back from two clicks (verb and noun) to a single click for the whole action. I expect there will be some debate as to whether the system is really suitable for interactive fiction. Your standard parser does allow for some degree of emergence, since you have only to tell it the generals of what it can or cannot do, and that applies across all possible locations and situations except those expressly excluded. On the other hand, a lot of the returns from this system will contain variations of "you can't do that here". The system used here by "Dead Hotel" cuts out all the "you can't do that here" situations, but at the same time it requires the author to consciously provide for every possible action at every juncture.

The story, meanwhile, is ... nothing much. It's a very standard zombie apocalypse scenario. We have little to no sense of who our hero is, or why he is in this hotel to begin with. He doesn't seem in the least bit surprised to see the shambling dead in their inexorable tides. I get the impression that it's really a thing hastily thrown together to demonstrate the system. Well ... I suppose all I can really say is that I'm going to be waiting for something a lot more substantial from this author. Something that will be more about the story itself than about the system.

A breakfast sandwich: ham between two pieces of English muffin, the whole thing cut into a perfect square. Water. What? Of course water: anything else might distract from the square muffinwich!