Mark Musante's A Simple Theft is indeed simple: you're apprenticed to a fellow who wants to retrieve a jewel from a castle, and you're sent in to do the deed--but it's a nice small game nonetheless, with just a few puzzles and a fairly thoroughly done backstory. The setting is fantasy, but magic at this point is not under control--your master is hoping to find something that would help in control it--and the incursion of magic at an entirely unexpected point in the story, and your discovery that a certain object has magical properties, therefore fit the plot nicely: you have no special insight into or control over magic, so you're not expecting it when it appears.

The technical aspect, while mostly good, isn't flawless: one puzzle is marred by what I consider a major design flaw (it turns on using an object that you're told you can't pick up), and a key object is rather confusingly described. Still, in a game this small, there's only so much that can go radically wrong, and on the whole the coding is fairly solid. Likewise, the writing is more than good enough to tell the story, and it's pretty funny in spots as well.

A Simple Theft feels like an introduction to a longer game--in particular, your boss, who's barely a character in this one, is an intriguing character who deserves more development in a longer, more in-depth game. Indeed, the ending text suggests that there's more to come: the story doesn't feel at all complete. For one thing, most of the names dropped in the introduction remain dropped--they're not explained anywhere--suggesting that the author intends to make something more of the world introduced here. The PC is worth fleshing out as well--it's intimated that you're a thief, but you don't learn anything about how you learned your trade or how you came to be apprenticed to your boss.

In short, A Simple Theft is a nice preview of what could be an intriguing full-length game. Should there be a followup, it'll certainly be worth a look.