The Plot

For interrupting a terrible open-mic poetry reading in late October, you are promised ... something. When you don't expect it.

On the night of October 31st, you fall asleep while reflecting on your month and planning what to do in November.

Dusk, Airy, Does Carry is unrepentantly based around one of the oldest, silliest tropes imaginable, one your college or even high school writing teacher would reject as done to death. But it features a wight, cute animals, a very weird tool, and two annoying dudebros to outsmart. Oh, and breathtaking nature! Or about as breathtaking as you can get with 256x40 MSPaint pixel art.

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

Dusk, Airy, Does Carry is an Adventuron game with 10 rooms (branching) and 12 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 two are Go-Strange-Ghost Range and Chez Dark Shade Ark.

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 was a happy accident because I finished the other two a lot quicker than I thought. I should've been reviewing IFComp games, but I got distracted by something shiny. The main feature of DADC is a command that seals off rooms once you're done with them, because it's not always obvious.

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, or in the GitHub repository, whichever works better. TSTART starts a transcript.

The GitHub repository also contains features implemented from my other EctoComp petite mort entries, which could not be fit in in four hours. The biggest is an in-game automap. It also generally provides better implementation.

KNOWN BUG NOTES

• (the big one) Currently X TOOL or X COIN turns room graphics white for the remainder of the game, because I failed to check the code properly. Since this isn't a game breaking bug (you can still win the game), I didn't fix it, but I appealed to the folks in charge. I won't change it unless they give the okay. (It's a 2-line fix for each, twiddling set_true and set_false. Aigh.) Thanks to Wade Clarke for notifying me.
• Small continuity error: if you talk to the blokes, they encourage you to defeat the wight, even if you already have.
• I forgot to credit Olaf Nowacki for the eastern room's name and puzzle. He wrote an EctoComp entry too!