Ryan Veeder's Judgment of "A Whispered Dream"

I like compactness. I worried that a prompt like "create an Inform 7 game with beautiful source code text" would inspire some Entrants to spend weeks or months crafting a bunch of sprawling epics. That's not what I want to see, and that's why I limited the timeframe of Event One to a single weekend. Beauty is in a small thing executed to perfection, not in a huge thing done to death.

This Entry, as submitted, does not compile in Inform 7. (There's a punctuation problem, and the property "concealed" is referred to without being defined.) The brief of the challenge is not satisfied, so I cannot award it a high score.

The subject matter of this Entry is too forlorn and wistful for my tastes. So, I cannot award it a high score.

The prose in this Entry is not my kind of thing. It doesn't strike me as beautiful. But the code around the prose is quite nice. If you remove the parts in quotation marks, you get stuff like this:

The angel is a person in the cage. The wings are part of the angel. The heart is part of the angel.

The heart is unyielding.

I want to point this out because some other Entries in this Event require quoted text to work properly, and so their beautifulness is, in a sense, not fully contained in their code. This Entry isn't like that: When I consider only the code of this entry, I find it very beautiful.

Therefore I award A Whispered Dream 5.98 points out of 10, which is as high as I can go without awarding it a high score.