You Won’t Get Her Back is a text game by Andrew Schultz. Or maybe a text puzzle. He has written a lot of games over the years and even gamified IF with Big Nose on the Big Pyramid. Here he’s implemented a version of chess, the full board, not like his previous game, Fourbyfourian Quarryin’, but it plays tight. There are not a lot of extra moves. It’s a bit on rails.

This one has you in the final moves of a chess game, trying to get a checkmate, not a stalemate. You have a pawn and king, the enemy, a rook and king. The pawn starts off two moves from being queen. It took some time to get used to it. But after I read the verbs, thanks to Drew Cook, the game became easier to play. This isn’t to say I beat it, but I did get a stalemate. And even knowing the verbs, it’s easy to make a mistake, and the puzzle will reset itself.

Making your way through the game is tricky. And when you do fail, you can get achievements. Failure is easy, though. And when it happens, it’s hard to visualize the final moves. It’s explained to you, but you don’t see where the pieces end up. The explanations are neat, but not being able to see the final layout makes it hard to finish the game.

With some tweaks, this game might be easier to play. But the puzzle was hard, or hard for me, and too tight to finish. I like chess. I like the idea of it being implemented in Inform, but that’s a near impossibility. Andrew made an interesting puzzle out of it. Too bad I couldn’t finish it. Maybe if he puts in the full board during the final move, I could grasp it a little better.