This game is an extended homage to my own "The Island of Doctor Wooby." Again, it is wise of Inverted Normals to pay tribute to my own work. But is it wise to submit an Entry that invites such direct comparison to my own work???
For example: In my game, you can pick up the dinosaurs. In "Chimeric Park," you cannot pick up the chimeras. What gives?
Another example: I have here a mauve dinirrorn named Roman that is always asleep. But I also have a yellow queeear named Molly who is very active and frequently is reported as playing together with Roman or racing Roman from one tree to another. Did the dinosaur behavior generation routine in "Doctor Wooby" allow similar inconsistencies? Maybe. We'd better not check. But you can see why it would perturb me to be reminded of "Doctor Wooby" by so many of this game's features and mechanics—Too many to analyze in detail here.
The autosaving mechanic is very nice. When Ryan Veeder's Authentic Fly Fishing auto-restores your progress, you nonetheless start out in your cabin; in "Chimeric Park," you appear right where you were when you left, and that contributes a lot to the Sense of Place in IF that I am forever seeking to perfect.
There aren't many rooms, and there aren't many things in those rooms, and you can't do a whole lot of things with those things. But there are some secrets! And the secrets are very well hidden. One way of looking at it would be to say that the puzzles are poorly clued. But the effect is that you never quite know whether you've seen everything, and I like that a lot.
Then there was one puzzle that really nagged at me, so I opened up the source code to try and hack the answer out. I strongly maintain that source diving in this way is a violation of the author's right to keep a game's secrets secret. I find this behavior odious. When people decompile games I get so, so ticked off. I would feel deeply ashamed of my actions in any other context, but as the Judge of this Exposition I am the sole arbiter in this context of what is right and what is wrong, and so I will let myself get away with it this time.
The author of this game, understandably unaware of the profound disgust I feel toward the practice of source diving, had taken steps to obfuscate the solution to this puzzle in a very clever way. As I untangled the Gordian JavaScript that Inverted Normals had woven, I realized: These Inverted Normals are playing the metagame of the Exposition to perfection. They are appealing not only to my narcissism, but to my paranoia and my obsessive need for control.
Therefore I award "Chimeric Park" 16.6 points out of 20.