The Adventures of the President of the United States

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The idea behind the game is wonderful--the President escapes from his boring job in the White House and visits various countries. Only the big ones, plus Finland and Sweden, get a room. The puzzles are apolitical and silly, and they are generally funny once you figure them out. APUS also gives many funny default responses and "You can't go that way" replacements.

Unfortunately, it's not big enough ("South America's not interesting,") and it neve builds on the gags. The few puzzles that veer from recognizing gently amusing stereotypes are poorly cued. While there's no guess-the-verb, there's plenty of trivial commands semi-logically changing the environment, or the effect of other trivial commands.

There's such a contrast between what you do to leave the White House (nothing unclean, but imagining ANY recent President doing this makes me giggle) and explaining that the White House is pretty boring, and you're bored, except for some generic details, that the game feels grossly unpolished.

This is too bad, because I don't think an American could make a game like this, with such a neat title, and stay apolitical. And yet, the author couldn't be expected to know that a West Wing would make the opening puzzle a lot better.

So, more countries and better descriptions--the potential's there, as I enjoyed many quips and default command responses--would've made this game memorable for more than the title and opportunities missed. Not that I regret playing it. I enjoyed filling in the details I wished the game had, but others may just get exasperated.

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>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction

It's been a long time since I've played a Mikko Vuorinen game. The last one was his 1999 comp entry King Arthur's Night Out, which bizarrely recast King Arthur as a henpecked husband in a domestic farce. Some people, like Adam Cadre, apparently found this hilarious, but it mostly left me cold. Still, I was pleased to see Vuorinen's name on a comp entry this year, and playing TAOTPOTUS felt like a reunion with a seldom-seen relative -- even though its behavior was often exasperating, I couldn't help feeling a certain fondness for it, both because of its reliably predictable traits and because of my sense of shared history with it.

- Edo, March 25, 2021

In this game, you play as the president of the united states, and every room is a country of the world.

It was quite entertaining to see that I could travel to Mexico to the south and Canada to the north.

The writing and implementation was a bit spotty, though, and it was hard to guess what to do next.

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- Mr. Patient (Saint Paul, Minn.), December 30, 2016

- Sam Kabo Ashwell (Seattle), April 16, 2012

- Nusco (Bologna, Italy), December 5, 2009

The Adventures of the President of the United States is a funny game you can play in 15 minutes. It's highly caricatural and can remind of some old point n click adventure games (you can travel through various countries with just the normal compass directions). Some puzzles are not hinted enough I think, and you have to carefully examine everything to get new clues and open new possibilities.

I didn't manage to finish it though, even with the walkthrough, because an object I was supposed to get wasn't at the expected place (Spoiler - click to show)(the opener in Russia), so I suppose it was just a bug (maybe replaying it with a different configuration may solve this).

It was enjoyable and diverting anyway.

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- Steve Evans (Hobart, Tasmania), November 22, 2007

- Quintin Stone (NC), October 23, 2007

- Eriorg (Switzerland), October 22, 2007

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