I played through _Deadline_ recently, as part of a project to play through a bunch of detective games. The last time I'd tried it was in the late '90s (so not q

I played through _Deadline_ recently, as part of a project to play through a bunch of detective games. The last time I'd tried it was in the late '90s (so not quite a 30 year break, but still substantial), and at the time I could literally make no progress at all. This time around it went a lot more smoothly; except for one particularly unfair bit that I had to eventually look up, it felt like the there was tangible progress at regular intervals. But Deadline is maybe a special case; it's not really a game of traditional adventure game puzzles using wacky dream logic. It's one half figuring out exactly what made each of the NPCs tick and manipulating them into doing things that advanced the plot, and one half doing mundane investigative work. It also has one of the most brilliant uses of a text parser ever. When interacting with a certain item in the house, you're naturally going to use a specific verb. This will just give you a bland and generic result. But if the player has discovered a specific bit of evidence and realized what it implies about the crime, it's obvious that you could use another verb on that object to verify the hunch. It's also not a verb you'd ever just randomly use on an item, so even people trying to brute-force their way through the game would miss it. It ends up as a really cool way of making sure that it's the player rather than the character solving the crime, and something that would be very hard to replicate in a graphical adventure game.