Playing A Game Tales of Lazo PC

In Tales of Lazo, you write prose descriptions of how the hero (er, Lazo) overcomes platforming and combat challenges. Explain how to beat the level, and then watch him do it! Like the English version of a programming-puzzle game. What a premise, right?

Of course the obvious question is, does it work well enough to maintain the illusion that you're writing a story instead of just entering keywords? And the answer is, no, it doesn't.

Its vocabulary is lacking, for one thing; I can write that Lazo "jumped" over a gap, but not that he "leaped" over it. And some definitions are surprisingly specific, for example while Lazo would be fine if he walked forward until he "reached a gap," walking forward until he "reached a ledge" would result in him trying to walk to a ledge past the "gap," tumbling head-first into the "gap" on his way there.

As frustrating as it is for this game to misinterpret my words, the problem is amplified even further by the high cost of death -- resetting the whole level. Falling into the sixth pit (or hole, or canyon, or whatever) results in having to retype the whole story from scratch.

Playing this guessing-game with Lazo's dictionary leads to dying and retrying, which in turn discourages wordiness in the written text, which thoroughly ruins the cool idea of the game. There's no point in wasting time and keystrokes on colorful language if Lazo is liable to fall in a pit anyway, so you may as well just enter "walked forward reached gap jumped forward" like it's a poorly-documented programming language instead of real, expressive prose.

This game idea needs a much stronger dictionary and more robust world-to-word abstraction to really make writing "fun." Short of that, it would probably be better to restrict the player to some pre-baked verbs and parameters, and make this a visual programming game instead of one about typing.

Progress: Didn't finish the demo.