IFComp09 reviews: Beta Tester
Ah, the ancient judges' lament. If it's been said once, it's been said a hundred times. "Please do not enter your exercise or practice games into the comp." But if you must, this is basically the way to do it.
This is a "toybox" game, where there's a bunch of random mostly-unconnected things, and you poke at them, and eventually you got tired of it and leave.
It's also pretty clearly a first game. There's a fair number of beginner mistakes like unimplemented scenery, and actions taken in the room description (an object can be called out as "catching your eye" even if it's gone, for instance). Custom verbs have no default behavior, so trying them on unexpected objects just gives you a prompt.
A running gag throughout the game is that the game pauses for you to hit a key constantly; a complex description will easily have six or seven components. This lends a staccato rhythm to the game that is unusual in IF. It manages a few jokes that otherwise wouldn't have worked, but I don't think it works as a general technique.
Oddly enough, this game would also be improved with a score; the frame story says you're testing a virtual environment, and a score would be a handy way of accounting for how much of the game we've seen. It would have an in-game justification and an out-of-game use; as it is, we have to type WALKTHRU to see what there is to see, and we aren't allowed to spell it right, either.
This seems like a litany of complaints, and it basically is. And yet, it's still got its high points. The writing is generally pretty decent, and some of the toys were fun to play with. (I'm a huge nerd and actually sat down and worked out the probabilities to get an optimimum strategy for the dice game; but hey, that means I was engaged, right?)