Here’s Jared Sorensen’s Parsely, a game that celebrates the text adventure videogames of the 80s, like Zork and other Infocom classics. For you younger readers, text adventures were interactive fiction. The game would present a scene, then you would type in commands, like “Look at the book” or, famously, “Get lamp.” The game’s text parser (which is where Parsely gets its name) would interpret what you wrote, giving you more information, executing the action, or saying something sarcastic if you typed in something dumb.

In Parsely, the person running the game acts as the text parser, presenting the scene and executing commands that players take turns shouting out. As the parser, you must be fair, but also cruel and quick with the wise cracks. There’s a scoring mechanic, a time limit and, of course, you can save and reload your game. And that’s about it. Because Parsely is meant for large groups in a party atmosphere (Sorensen has run the game at conventions for hundreds of people at once!) the rules are simple and to the point, running about 7 pages.

The rest of the hefty book is devoted to the pre-made scenarios. There are three Zork parodies, a “gritty” cyberpunk mystery, a haunted house, a western, a send-up of Indiana Jones and more. They are of varying complexity and structured just like their videogame counterparts, with plenty of tricky puzzles and humor to spare. One on one, the Parsely scenarios would probably be fairly easy to work through, but the game actively uses the crowd dynamic of the players against them. It gets hilarious fairly quickly.

I love the fun, cartoonish art throughout, and especially like the faux-computer graphic design. I…don’t know if I can really call it an RPG, but I also don’t know what else to call it, so RPG it is. This is a great one to have on the shelf for some casual fun.