The Plot

You're not in any sort of holiday mood, so you decide to walk across the street and through the park instead of bugging kids who're enjoying themselves. Or being bugged by how cheerful they are. You trespass through a park ... but it's not the park you think you're trespassing through. You're captured and sent to a cell. And not just any cell: a wee clink!

Escape the cell, get around weapons of war, undead creatures, and a thief who talks about themselves in the third person, and come face-to-face with your captor.

This is a reduced parser game, which means you mainly just use directions (UP/DOWN/IN/OUT/N/S/E/W), EXAMINE, X (ITEM) and I/INVENTORY. There are also meta-verbs like ABOUT and CREDITS and VERBS, and THINK is there if you get the words for a puzzle but don't have the support yet from friends/allies. There's also an in-game map, though this was more about programming vanity. And I have a walkthrough if you are really stuck on a puzzle.

History and Technical Details

Chez Dark Shade Ark;is an Adventuron game with 11 rooms (3x3 grid, plus start and end rooms) and 13 puzzles, some of which rely on others. It was one of three games written for EctoComp Petite Mort 2025. I hope you enjoy it. Number one and three are Go-Strange-Ghost Range and Dusk, Airy, Does Carry.

My first (somewhat longer) Adventuron game was Quirky Test, and two other much longer games with the same mechanics as this are Why Pout and Us Too. This game actually came directly from taking a break after releasing Why Pout. I saw a few good ideas, and the name of the final puzzle in particular made me laugh. I wanted to do something different than GSGR, and this just has more rooms.

Known Bugs

• You can solve the second puzzle more than once for infinite points. This doesn't help or impair your ability to solve future puzzles. It's just, I probably blew past this test case, since the other rooms had more moving parts. Oops.
• There's a bug where you can defeat the tanks with only the item and not the companion. This doesn't stop you from winning, but it's a bit silly. It's unlikely to happen, as the companion is much easier to get, but just so you know.
• You may notice two graphics are duplicated. One was meant to be a door. You can see the actual intended graphic in the graphics subdirectory of the GitHub repository, where it is r20-0.png. (If you're curious, I defined rooms by their location on the map above, since their names could change, and numbers helped me sort them together better than the names.

Given that this was written in four (non-continuous) hours, the implementation isn't VERY detailed (e.g. you'll want to use nouns if you can,) but I still would like to know about bugs, typos, what seems unfair, etc. Report them in the comments, where I will also track bugs (don't worry about duplication,) or in the GitHub repository, whichever works better. TSTART starts a transcript if you want to show the bug in detail, via email or the comments.

Post-Comp Goals

The GitHub repository, again, has a list of bug fixes from October 31st onward that will go into post-comp release. They include an in-game map, better item implementation, and better THINK advice. For instance, _ THIEF or _ LORD now nags the thief lord and gives you a clue.