Poppet

In this story, we're a rag doll who reawakens to find the house in ruins and several of the other dolls also awake. The rules of the world state that a toy draws life from the love of a child, and goes into a permanent sleep once that child grows up and leaves that toy behind. This is clearly what's happened with our owner, so why are we awake again?

Turns out fear can be as powerful as love (witness: the bogeyman and the monster under the bed) and now we are legitimate Creepy Dolls. Also, our previous owner's grandfather was a sort of hedge wizard, so there's magic involved.

What follows is a series of puzzles as we try to turn the magic to our own ends in order to find out exactly what's going on, and then to do something about it. I have no complaints about the puzzle design, although I did find that the Quest parser isn't quite so robust as I would like; or, at least, where I had to readjust my idea of IF conventions. Most parsers are fairly articulated, but Quest seems to like the more generic verb "use": I often found that where I failed to "put" something in/on something else, I should have "used" the first on the second instead. My one quibble that I'd place at the author's door was one instance where "search" wasn't implemented as something that could be done to a large pile of china.

I did find the thing pretty satisfactory. The world seems fully fleshed out, and the characters distinctly drawn. I think this is like French toast for breakfast, finished with a glass of milk. It holds up well where it doesn't stick to the pan, and it looks good without getting unnecessarily complex.