Ryan Veeder's Judgment of "85 Verbs"

The cute concept of this game goes a long way with me. I often amuse myself by trying to design games where I use only Inform 7's default actions; using all of them, apparently each one only one time, is extremely adorable.

Prismatik admits that the game is undertested, and it is pretty rough around the edges; on the other hand, the game frequently tells you exactly what to do next, so I didn't get stuck very much; on the third hand, that's also because there isn't much to do other than what you're supposed to do next.

The urgency of the story is well-conveyed through the mannerisms of a crowd of PCs and the Virgil figure of Skrit, neither of which are actually implemented in the world model as far as I can tell. This sounds like an obvious flaw, but I find it weirdly impressive. And I really felt invested in the story, so much so that I couldn't bring myself to ignore the throng's shouted instructions lest I put them in danger.

A lot of the characters in the crowd of PCs are references to other games. Some of them seem to be figments dreamt up by Prismatik, but maybe I'm just not recognizing them. I have judging work to do, so I can't make it my business to try and identify them all, so I lay this task upon you, the reader.

Anyway, this is a nice game, and therefore I award "85 Verbs" 19.8 points out of 30.