Moonlit Tower by Yoon Ha Lee is a free online parser IF game from 2002.
At the end of last year, I wrote a thing in praise of Lee's writing, and Moonlit Tower is very much a vehicle for the same. As with many things she has written since, Tower is a story with the texture of fantasy and the economy of science fiction, where words (which is to say nouns) are not just estranged but overdetermined, forced to perform the heavy lifting of fabricating context with only ignorance as leverage.
Tower in particular is rich in description and diversion; the core path takes only 14 moves (though you'd never get to fly the kite that way). A richness in parser IF is different than a richness in printed prose, however. Here, what is implicit in ray guns or ansibles becomes mechanical, as the entrance to a room describes a painting to be examined describing a scene with multiple interactive parts. Words become things in both cases, and seeing both can be a bulb.
Which isn't to say that it is a revelation. But for an author who has no shortage of writing with a fantastical materialist conception of language, being able to see how she anticipated being talked back to in return is a joy.
[10/02/2014]
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