A Scurvy of Wonders

Drawing the game's name from a poster of text adventure title mash-ups on the wall of the Interactive Fiction hospitality suite at the 2011 Penny Arcade East expo, the evocative phrase inspired its authors to assemble a piece of "Speed-IF" -- a text adventure game constructed with great rapidity and typically quite brief in scope.

The scope of this particular game is analogous to that of a typical "escape the room" game -- the player finds themselves supine on the deck of a luxury yacht after too many days of solitary nautical revelry, laid low by malnutrition and, specifically, scurvy. Feverish and hallucinating, the player must use a highly constrained set of verbs to spin hazy encounters with seagoing animals -- a sea gull, a manatee, and a stowaway rat -- into mutually resolving scenes equipping the player with the essential dose of Vitamin C necessary to get the boat turned around and pointed back to safety.