The House on Sycamore Lane

This is a fairly late-old-school game, the sort that's largely about object manipulation but with some nominal gesture towards establishing a protagonist and setting. We've escaped the school bully by entering the local haunted house, and now we've got to find a way out because said bully has blocked the window we came in by with a boulder.

I'm getting a mid-1980s vibe off this already. I bet we're played by someone named Corey.

The overall game design is pretty simple. There's nothing here to suggest an advanced familiarity with the tools. The prose is peppered here and there with the sort of minor typos that might escape a spellchecker: its/it's errors, for instance, or inexplicably doubled words. In one or two places, the paragraph space before the parser prompt is missing. I suspect this wasn't beta-tested, though I do note that the game never breaks down at any point. It's competently put together, despite the rough edges.

On the whole, I suspect that the author is new and just getting into the medium. They've proceeded with caution and done their best with what they currently have at their disposal. I appreciate that they haven't tried to make any excuses for themselves. I feel like this offering of theirs might be something like peanut butter on toast, a bowl of cornflakes, and orange juice, served to Mom in bed on Mother's Day. If there's been a bit of spillage along the way up the stairs, at least it's edible and tasty, and the kitchen's not on fire. Maybe next year we will crack out the skillet and try doing something with eggs.