An Interactive Fiction writer and reviewer. He is known for his Puzzle Games, which are often built around a certain concept such as wordplay or themed puzzles.
Notable works include:
- Shuffling Around. The entire game revolves around forming Significant Anagrams to get where you need to go and solve puzzles.
- The Prime Pro Rhyme Row series. Each game has you explore a world where you have to write rhyming couplets (e.g. "trite trope write rope") based on your surroundings to transform objects into more usable ones. There are seven games as of 2023.
- The I Heart High Art series. These games revolve around spoonerisms (e.g. "Roads of Liches" vs. "Loads of Riches").
- Ailihphilia: An adventure game revolving around locations, people, and objects that are based around palindromes.
- Threediopolis and its sequel, Fourdiopolis. In these games, you navigate by typing in certain combinations of directions that take you to places depending on what they spell out: such as down, up, north, east, and south taking you to desert dunes or north, east, and down leading to a guy named Ned.
- A few chess-themed puzzlers including Fivebyfivia Delenda Est, Fourbyfourian Quarryin, and Knight With a Message.
Tropes found in his games:
- Alliterative Name: The protagonist of Very Vile Fairy File is named Kerry Kyle.
- Antagonist Title: Very Vile Fairy File, named after the titular Artifact of Doom that will show up to insult you throughout the game until you finally destroy it.
- Anti-Frustration Features: In the Prime Pro Rhyme Row games:
- Each of the games gives you the Leet Learner, a tool that gives you hints on how many letters you need to change for an item to get the right solution.
- Another tool is the Lurking Lump. Typing guesses that make sense but aren't exactly what you need will contribute the lump, and when you make enough, you earn a Jerking Jump that can immediately solve a puzzle you're stuck on.
- Solutions you've figured out that you can't use yet will be stored in the THINK command for later use, signaling when you can use them.
- Developer's Foresight: The Prime Pro Rhyme Row games will have a special response to any rhyme you can think of that uses real words. The game actually encourages thinking of as many as you can, even if they won't immediately help, because solutions you find now are kept track of for later and ones that aren't still contribute to a free puzzle skip.
- Edutainment Game: Mrs. Crabtree's Geography Class is a a geography-focused minigame. You have to visit every US state by hopping between states that border each other, and you can't visit the same ones you've already been to.
- Extended Gameplay: After completing all 40 tasks for Ed Dunn and meeting all 10 friends in Threediopolis, you can restart the game to complete an extra list of 80 bonus objectives. (You may also complete some of these while playing your first time around, but they're not explicitly hinted like the main game tasks are.) Fourdiopolis has a similar feature but with 15 bonus tasks added.
- Fun with Palindromes: Almost everything in Ailihphilia is a palindrome, from the place names, to the people you meet, to the items you can pick up. The game loves making jokes with them, such as this after you EVADE DAVE:Consulting the Set O Notes, you notice there may be at least one more guh thug, but nothing too violent. That's good. You'd hate to have to TRUCK CURT, MASH SAM, RAM OMAR, SIT ON OTIS or even DISS SID.
- Meaningful Rename: In Bright Brave Knight Knave, you meet a man drinking named Losing Lou. After you give him a pep talk, he renames himself to Turning-to-Learning Lou and writes an entire book on cocktail napkins.
- Rhymes on a Dime: The main gameplay of the Prime Pro Rhyme Row games is thinking of alliterative rhyming couplets to solve puzzles.
- Scoring Points:
- You gain points in the Prime Pro Rhyme Row series for accomplishing objectives you need to progress. Each game also has a few bonus points for solving certain tricky puzzles.
- Threediopolis and Fourdiopolis are loaded with little bonus locations that aren't ones you need to solve to beat the game, but will earn you extra points.
- Spoonerism: The I Heart High Art games are based around solving puzzles by visiting spoonerism-themed places and using items you find. For instance, the first game has "All Smiles" vs. "Small Isles" and "Pick Quest" vs. "Quick Pest".
