Loved this! Such a unique entry and a fun riff on the theme too. Having the option to play on an actual phone was a great touch (excuse the pun) and definitely felt like the best experience. That combined with authentic multi-tap typing really boosted the immersion!
It took a while for that mid-2000s SMS typing muscle memory to kick in, but when it did, it started to feel much more fluid than I expected. The glossary and single letter shortcuts were really helpful too. It might be tricky to implement but if you were thinking of developing it further, it would be cool to add the T9 predictive text model the 3310 used to speed things up even more.
This style of game very much hinges on the writing and you've done a great job there too. Just the right dose of humour and I like that you threw in the odd option just for fun (I've played way too much Monkey Island not to instinctively try to pocket any syrup I see lying around...). Great work!
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Thanks for the feedback! Not sure if I'll develop this any further, the typing gimmick is probably just annoying and cumbersome outside of the game jam context... But I had fun making it, so who knows.
I was actually thinking of implementing T9, and in this case that would probably be pretty easy (since every room has a list of valid commands, it would be easy to check the current input against all valid commands and figure out which one you're after), my main reason for not prioritizing it was that I couldn't decide on the best way to swap between t9 on and off.
I wish I'd had more time for adding odd options! It was not just for fun, it was partially to avoid the player getting "invalid command" every other sentence, but also to fill up the list of commands shown by the help command so that it doesn't just give away the correct options.
Thanks again for a helpful comment!