Hector smirks. “I seem to remember you were an okay second-story man.”
“I was never a man.”
“You know what I mean, lady. You wanna see your brother again, you got a job to do. The workprint for your brother. What do you say?”
Second Story is a parser game with a web interface. (See: Gamefic.) It doesn’t work on iPhone (“‘Examine’ is not a verb I recognize.”) so I switched to computer.
The interface does one nice trick with menus: they are displayed as a popup and you can click on the option you want with your mouse.
You play a retired thief who gets pulled in for one last job.
Unfortunately, the parser isn’t as powerful as the typical Inform/Tads/Hugo game. >EXAMINE BED in the protagonist’s apartment gave me a blank response, and “get” is unrecognized as a verb (I had to use “take”). There are also a fair number of unrecognized nouns.
There’s very little character to the room descriptions. After a scene with distracting a guard and breaking in a room, the player is rewarded with:
A windowless room with a desk. Suitable for student conferences and not much else.
You carefully shut the door behind you.
All the lengthy prose is reserved for the “cutscenes” with conversation; this drains out the atmosphere.
The puzzles were straightforward (simplistic, even) until I reached a point I needed to use a ladder to progress, and I could not figure out the appropriate phrasing to place the ladder where I wanted. After about 15 minutes of struggle I resorted to the walkthrough.
There was a clever trick at the end with ensuring a safe ransom exchange, but the verb problems and minimalist prose had yanked me out of the story’s reality enough by that point I didn’t really get to appreciate it. It feels like author made some dialogue cutscenes and built a world around it, rather than the other way around, leading a flat parser experience.
Renga in Blue 
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