The plot is entertaining and reasonably original. You are an engineer sent across the country to start a new job, but you bog down in the wilds of Arizona with almost no gas, stuck behind a parade for a "rock festival"--and no, Janis Joplin is not in town. The events that ensue are engagingly cartoony; though most of the parade elements amount to amusing but irrelevant sideshows, the silliness adds to the charm. (A gravel float? A tank full of jars of pebbles?) The characters are also well done, though better developed in some cases than in others; the humor value of the New Age bikers is considerable, but it might have been nice to see what they do when you ask them about things like inner peace, meditation, truth, etc. (Not to nitpick, but the line "The bikers toss an unruly customer out of the pub and forgive themselves for their trespasses" is a little silly. Since when do New Agers care about sin?) The encounter with the bikers does, if the randomized movements come out right, produce this exchange...

As the words pass before your eyes, your spirit energies ebb and flow
between hidden layers of conscious awareness, broken judgment, and
unspoken truth. Once the trance lifts, your soul speaks of love and
respect through haiku verse, the natural language of inner peace.


The old man turns his pockets inside out to search for spare change.

Everybody Loves a Parade is not extremely difficult once the first puzzle is solved--but that first puzzle involves searching of scenery that just barely gets a mention, and as such might take quite a while to solve. Two other puzzles later in the game require a fairly large intuitive leap, and a willingness to pursue courses of action that don't seem initially helpful (and which are, well, largely motivationless), and those moments pose considerable stumbling blocks among mostly logical puzzles. (Though one solution in particular is rather clever, and rewards careful reading.) The quality of the puzzles can be appreciated once they are solved, but the intuitive leaps required can be a bit daunting at times. (I'm not sure what it says about me, though, that the final puzzle--at least, the way to get the final 10 points--seemed like a natural reaction to the previous line, and it was the first thing I tried.) There is much amusement to be had in the game even when stuck, though, just from wandering around and trying things--it seems safe to say that this game has the most particularized responses to SMELL [object] in the history of IF.

Mechanically, Everybody Loves a Parade works well; the TADS parser is adequate for the job, and there are several synonyms for most words. The writing is also quite good, though not exceptionally descriptive--few of the scenes actually came alive from the writing, though admittedly that would have been difficult given the bizarre quality of the situations. The author trades absurdity for realism, mostly, and does quite well with it--but creating absurd scenes is a different task from creating real ones, and it is therefore hard to compare the writing to a game that seeks to bring a place or event to life. Cody Sandifer creates a carnival atmosphere, but a carnival atmosphere is hard to sustain on repetition--a bouncy or silly room description fades on the tenth reading in a way that a menacing or dreary mood does not. All this is not, obviously, to say that Everybody Loves a Parade is not written effectively, merely that the intent is more to amuse and entertain than to create lasting images. Well, actually, as noted above, that isn't true--there is one image that does last, and quite well--but the circumstances for that are unusual.

Mr. Sandifer clearly spent quite a while writing Everybody Loves a Parade: it's full of humor that indicates real thoroughness. There are several irrelevant objects--"objects", perhaps--that cannot quite be considered red herrings because it would be difficult to consider most of them potential solutions to problems, and which reduce the feel of "am I done coding yet?" that sometimes plagues IF. (An author who takes the trouble to code a "pulsing hunk of supernatural hypermatter" is an author who cares about her finished product.) That some scenes made me wish for more development is more a testament to the amusing ideas at work than any laziness about coding; I certainly can't say that there were many logical responses that went unprovided for.

Perhaps the reason for my initial objection to the twist alluded to above was that it didn't fit the game, but when I thought about it more, I revised that assessment. Only in a romp like this could the author pull the player up short in the way Mr. Sandifer does--and there are (at least, it seemed so to me) very unfunny (as in, not a laughing matter) issues at stake when it does happen, both within and outside the game. There is certainly a place for games like "Tapestry," where the player has to shut his or her eyes and ears to miss the Important Underlying Message, but the IF world should not underrate the power of this game's approach in making the player think.

There is, on the whole, much to like about Everybody Loves a Parade, and though there are slow points and though the humor slows a bit when the player has traipsed through the few locations several times, such is the nature of humorous IF; Mr. Sandifer carries off her ideas well. It is a testament to the author's skill that the player can look back on Everybody Loves a Parade as both entertaining and thoroughly thought-provoking.