Jenny called you late and asked to meet you out here in the middle of nowhere. You've never been this far in the forest before and you never knew this white house was out here. She said she had something important to tell you and she never joked about those kinds of things so you felt it must be important...so you came.....against your best judgement, but you've always been a good friend.....you just hope you don't regret it.
Shufflecomp, if you're not familiar, is a competition where each entrant is given a list of song titles submitted by others, and our job is to write a short work based on that song (song itself or just the title). In my list of song titles to base the game on, the only one that really jumped out at me was White Houses by Vanessa Carlton whom I had never heard of before and had never heard this song. The name jumped out at me, obviously because of the Zork reference so I decided to take another look at the White House of Zork fame.
This was only my second released game and I was still learning I7 at the time. This was very much a work rushed as the timeline for Shufflecomp was relatively short, so this game was short and lightly implemented. I've always kind of enjoyed this game and while it got mixed reviews during the competition, it is still one of my favorites that I've written (released or not). Shortly after the competition, I released another version that fixed a few obvious bugs and then began planning for a more thorough version that filled in the gaps of implementation and story, expanded the map and things to do and tie it closer to the Zork world and timeline beyond just the setting itself.
And I didn't get much beyond the planning phase, so here we are. I've opened up the source and while I still have plans to expand this out, I7 is lower on my priority list these days so we'll see how far this gets. In the meantime, enjoy the game. Feel free to report bugs and or make suggestions for improvements.