Gleaming the Verb
Kevin Jackson-Mead (2009)
There’s always been an ago old problem with IF, and that’s the guess-the-verb puzzle.
Like: GRAPPLE ROCK WITH HOOK instead of ATTACH HOOK TO ROCK.
No one has ever herd of Grapple, but Attach is very common. For the author it seems like it
should make sense, but for the player it becomes frustration to the point of putting down the
game. Beta testing flushes this sort of thing out, and it’s almost always best to work in a
standard verb for your puzzle. But in
Gleaming the Verb all the rules are broken in
this brain twister of a game.
The game is straightforward, there’s a cube you get to interact with using all sorts of nonstandard
verbs. And each verb comes from the response of the last interaction, a short sentence that you have
to find the cryptic pattern of letters that provide you with the next verb.
It was really fun playing through this game. It felt like a real test of my intellect, seeing if I
could find the verb without having to turn to the walkthrough. And I got through most of the game,
all but the last puzzle. Here I didn’t even know if I had all the words to work with, and no matter
what patterns I found I couldn’t get anything to come up. Finally I gave in and looked at the
walkthrough, and yeah, I was missing one, so I didn’t make it all the way.
In the end I scored this game a 7. The puzzle was awesome, and I would love to see more of
these games, but there was no story or strong prose, not that the game needed it, but that did affect
the overall score bringing it down quite a bit.
This is a quick game that will test you, and if you’re up to it, see if you can try and beat it
without turning to the walkthrough. I couldn’t, but I had fun trying.