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Shore Leave

by Michael Bellamy

1998

(based on 1 rating)
1 review

About the Story

The aim of the game is to escape from your spaceship so you can claim the shore leave you have been saving up for 18 months. Your Captain can neither spare the time nor find the intelligence to actually steer the ship to somewhere nice for you so you will have to find your own way. The ship is generally a safe and pleasant place to be, but try not to annoy the ship's bully, and be careful mooching around in the dark cargo decks...


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Number of Reviews: 1
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Juvenile and hard to play, March 27, 2021
by Victor Gijsbers (The Netherlands)

After playing two random Spectrum adventures (the very good Celtic Carnage and the decent Time Quest), I was perhaps getting unrealistic expectations about works coming from this community. If so, Shore Leave put me squarely back on my feet.

In this game, you take on the role of a minor character on a big space ship with the aim of getting it to a nice place for your shore leave. I can't say much more than that, because I found the experience deeply off-putting and never got very far. Part of that is the difficulty of getting the game to understand you. For instance, there is a cinema where you have to buy a ticket in order to see a film. There's someone who sells ticket, and someone who keeps you from seeing the film if you don't have one. Now the documentation specifically lists the verb "buy", but no variation of "buy ticket" that I tried had any effect; nor did "get ticket", "buy" by itself, and so on. There were already various points in the game where I knew what I wanted to do, but didn't find the syntax to actually do it.

Possibly I would have tried harder if the content of the game had been more to my liking. But this is a game that is desperate to be funny, yet only made me cringe. Here's an example. When you take the elevator to the main bridge, you end up in a location that is a bridge across a river. That's actually kind of funny. But the room description goes on to say: "As this location is nothing more than a cheap joke you are advised to proceed back to the lift." That really kills the joke for me. Worse are rooms like this: "You are on the main engineering concourse. This is a really boring place and I'm finding it difficult to make it sound otherwise." This is a cardinal sin -- boring the player and then treating the boredom as a joke. And then there's the Terminal Illness ward: "The people here are doomed to spend the rest of their days in this room. [...] South leads to the spare parts room." "You are now in the spare parts room. Bits of body are hanging from the ceiling on large metal hooks."

To me, it all feels as the worst kind of juvenile humour; utterly tasteless and unlikely to get better as the game proceeds. So I'm not exploring it any further. Nevertheless two stars, since from what I've seen this probably is a competently programmed puzzle adventure. There are those to whom it might appeal.

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This is version 2 of this page, edited by Victor Gijsbers on 23 March 2021 at 9:41pm. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item - Delete This Page