I'm not the author but I am also an ADRIFT user and would like to comment but first I would like to say it is a nice review and all your points are valid. My comment is about your statement about the ADRIFT community. As you wrote, I'm sure someone told you that the implementation problems you found are acceptable in the ADRIFT community. However, I don't think that is the case. All the mentioned implementation issues can be dealt with in ADRIFT. We are not a lot of ADRIFT users but we are also diverse and most agree that guess-the-verb issues should be avoided and also we want to avoid explicitly do things over and over that are obvious, such as having to explicitly open every door each time you go through them etc. Of course, when we dive into details, there will be different opinions on e.g. standard verbs etc. often depending on which community the player was part of years ago, e.g. if they played the homegrown UK games around 1990 or if they played all the Infocom games in the 80s.
Viewing post in October 31st. jam comments
Just to kick in a footnote here.
I'm not too happy about having to open the doors every time, and I do try to avoid it when I can.
Having said this. There are mechanisms in the game where a monster will be "summoned" or where a location will alter when the door is opened. So rather than having some doors staying open and other doors closing, I chose to make them all closing after the player had walked through them.