Never Gives Up Her Dead

There are a lot of free parser games out there, and some of them are pretty good. Why should anyone pay for this one? The plain answer is that, depending on what you're looking for, Never Gives Up Her Dead might be the best of the lot. It's a massive game that never feels overstuffed. It includes multiple, vividly-realized settings, and some very diverse mechanics. It has a compelling narrative hook and engaging characters, something often missing from text adventures. The writing is good, too! This is the whole package, and it is very much commercial grade. But mostly, this game, more than any other, successfully evokes the sense of wonder and grand adventure that I experienced playing adventure games on microcomputers. It doesn't feel like one of those games, mind you. It had better not! We've had 40 years of technological and design evolution in the meantime, and it shows. So far as the epic text adventure goes, this is the current state of the art.

Extremely, incredibly good. Long time player of IF games, and this has shot right into my personal top 5 long parser games (for reference, the other four are Counterfeit Monkey, Vespers, Shade and Make it Good), and this one stands out as both beginner friendly AND rewarding to the experienced player. Some of the nicest level design I've seen in an IF game, where it's usually really easy to get lost. I only had to make a map for a couple of locations and could keep the overall area pretty clear in my mind, with the strong descriptions helping. The game itself is also much more like 10 (or 11?) games in one, and rather than having one Unique Gimmick TM, it's more of a showcase of the depth and breadth of what the genre allows you to do. I felt like creativity, exploration and experimentation were rewarded nicely, with plenty of fun Aha Moments. Took me about 15 hours to casually clear it, and I had to use the walkthrough at 4 points, when I got stuck. I didn't feel like any of the solutions were unfair, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, or required some sort of weird 'combine CHICKEN with LEAF BLOWER' levels of weird logic. It's impressive how NOT overwhelming this game feels, considering the sheer size of it and how many moving parts it's juggling. The full story and ending was also quite lovely, with a very nicely done endgame that really brought it together without being an extremely complex logical Gordian Knot. Often with narrative-heavy games I have to ask, why did it use this medium? What did telling it in this way do for the story that another medium couldn't have done better? And I'd say in this one, the format was perfect for the story it aimed to deliver. Honestly the entertainment value to price ratio on this game is insanely good, and I would highly rec it whether you're new to the genre or very familiar with it. I'd say 'they just don't make games like this any more', but clearly, they do! For more reviews of it, do check out its IFDB page as well.