Glowgrass

Baf's Guide

A xenohistorical expedition to recover artifacts of "the Ancients" takes on a surprisingly human and personal tone in this far-future sci-fi story. Simple Planetfall-like puzzles, thoughtful prose that establishes moods with parsimony. Short but not rushed. Well worth playing.

-- Carl Muckenhoupt

>VERBOSE -- Paul O'Brian's Interactive Fiction Page

Glowgrass is a well-written game with a pleasantly creepy aura, a pleasurable way to spend a couple of hours and hopefully a prelude to more quality work.
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Average Rating: Number of Reviews: 3 Write a review

A Dispiriting Future / A Frustrating Present, April 25, 2010
Glowgrass presents a future that is shrived of emotion and a time where natural resources are nearly depleted. This perspective is unavoidable, due to every room and every object being described in the same mathematical manner with salient environmental preachments. This approach made the game not very enjoyable, but I was able to muddle through until the bugs and the under-implementation hit.

Trying to (Spoiler - click to show)plug things in or connect them is a well-known problem with this game (see prior reviews). If you use the word "connect" by itself, you'll get a loverly TADS error. And if you type "HINTS", guess what? There aren't any! However, the ABOUT tells you that this game is not a puzzle-fest, but a story. That's cold comfort when you're left wondering what to do with the objects that you can't fit together in any way.

There are a few interesting moments that I was able to discover, but they don't make up for the dispiriting and frustrating whole.

Nice setting, August 25, 2009
The best thing about Glowgrass is the setting. It's an interesting premise, though sparsely implemented, that does a pretty good job of drawing you in.

The environment is pretty small, and the puzzles for the most part are quite simple - though as another reviewer mentioned, there are some flaws in the implementation. For example, if you throw x at y, you are told that you can't reach y with just your hands! (Spoiler - click to show)The really irritating part is that you ARE supposed to throw x at y... but if you specify the target, you're screwed.

The conversational mechanic is also a little unintuitive - if you're having trouble, just realize there's an ABOUT keyword, and it's crucial.

If you don't get caught on the rough edges in the mechanics, Glowgrass will probably only take you 15 or 30 minutes to finish, if that. It's worth playing.

Solid and Enjoyable, December 8, 2008
Overall, I thought this was a delightful game. It was fun to play with the point of view presented. The writing was also solid. There's not a lot implemented, but what is has character. As this was a competition game, it was designed to play under two hours, but I finished it just under. It would have been great to have had more to explore. Exploration is the main aspect of the game, rather than puzzles. It does have puzzles, though the mechanics have something to be desired.(Spoiler - click to show) I had to resort to the walkthrough to figure out how to attach and detach from the cable. But I was looking for a short and fun game, which I found.

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