Some rainy November evening, you rush into an opulent opera house and prepare to divest yourself of a soaked + gloomy velvet garment, that you might receive an important message in a surprising place and fashion. Preserving the sequence of these goals is paramount.

A demonstration game not written for usual "demo" purposes (to suggest design and technical abilities of some hypothetical full version) but rather to indicate to potential game designers differences between umpteen various popular amateur interactive fiction authoring systems (for those keeping track at home: A-code, AAS, ADRIFT, AGI, AGT, Aiee!, AIFT, ALAN, CAT, Hugo, IAGE, Inform 6 and 7, JACL, LADS, PAWS, Quest, SUDS, TADS 2 and 3, and Undum) for purposes of cross-comparison for potential authors shopping around for a new development environment; the stock game specification, such as it is, contains only three rooms and three objects (a message, a brass wall-mounted hook, and the titular dark cloak), with only a single puzzle between them. Where the fun and education lies is in examining the respective annotated source codes provided, to observe how different authors coaxed different languages to provide similar results.

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