IFComp09 Review: Gleaming the Verb
The Interactive Fiction Competition is an annual event that’s been running since 1995 (this is the 15th iteration). Anyone can participate, whether by submitting a game or by voting on the entries. I’m doing the latter.
Gleaming the Verb, by Kevin Jackson-Mead, is a word puzzle with an interactive fiction framework. I think it would be fine as part of a larger work, but once I’d figured out the nature of the puzzle, I finished the game very quickly. The setting is minimal and there’s no way to repeat the word-clues once you’ve discovered them. The initial move requires some verb-guessing, too (you have to ‘read cube’, an object previously described as “made of some kind of highly-polished metal”, and with no indication that it’s got anything written on it).
I must confess to not being a fan of this kind of puzzle, but I have no real problem with it as long as it makes sense in the setting and the rest of the game is interesting. Here I didn’t think either requirement was fulfilled, with the result that the title is the most memorable thing about this game.