Aisle

A common criticism of adventure games generally and works of interactive fiction specifically is that they oftentimes suffer from what have been characterized as “read-the-designer’s-mind” puzzles — making necessary apparently arbitrary (and sometimes seemingly absurd) actions that produce unreasonable-to-expect results; the puzzles look kosher in a walkthrough but only make sense to a player after the fact, knowing of their implausible effect. Aisle is the inverse: the designer has instead had to read the player’s mind, predicting which actions, likely or unlikely, the player is apt to attempt in the somewhat under-stimulating environment (certainly an unusually pedestrian game setting) of the Italian foods section of a supermarket late one Thursday night.