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Adrift 4 game - do not play with Adrift 5 interpreters
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All games entered in The Comp With No Name 2008
Contains Beanstalk.taf
Download from the ADRIFT site
Requires an ADRIFT version 4 interpreter. Visit IFWiki for download links. (Compressed with ZIP. Free Unzip tools are available for most systems at www.info-zip.org.)
Story file version 1.0
Download from IF Archive
Requires an ADRIFT version 4 interpreter. Visit IFWiki for download links.
Story file version 1.0
Download from author's site
Requires an ADRIFT version 4 interpreter. Visit IFWiki for download links.
Beanstalk.amf.txt
Source part 1: AMF file, from author's website
Beanstalk.alr.txt
Source part 2: ALR file, from author's website
Walkthrough
at Delron

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Beanstalk the and Jack

by David Welbourn profile

Children's, Fantasy
2008

Web Site

(based on 4 ratings)
1 review

About the Story

The story of "Jack and the Beanstalk" - but backwards!


Game Details


Awards

Winner - The Comp With No Name 2008

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
One trick, but an interesting one, June 10, 2008

The content of this story won't be a surprise to anyone, and it's pretty light on puzzles, too: this is Jack and the Beanstalk told backwards. At each turn, you have to guess the move that Jack took to get to the present situation.

The resulting game is necessarily pretty linear, though not quite as straitjacketed as you might expect -- it's possible to wander around looking at things and taking other non-world-changing actions, as long as your next significant act is the correct one. The actual puzzle of figuring out what to do next is usually not that hard, given (a) the knowledge of the game state it produced and (b) familiarity with the original story, which means that the story goes by quickly and doesn't wear out its welcome. The peculiar reverse-causality remains entertaining throughout.

The implementation is pretty smooth overall -- I ran into only one or two moments where I had trouble with unrecognized commands that I thought ought to make sense. (Spoiler - click to show)In particular, I tried a bunch of variations of >ENTER OVEN, GET IN OVEN, OPEN OVEN, and the like, before realizing that I needed IN to hide there.

On the whole, this game doesn't have much to offer beyond its gimmick, but that's enough to amuse for the fifteen minutes or so it takes to play. And it's definitely an interesting take on treatment of time in IF.

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Beanstalk the and Jack on IFDB

Recommended Lists

Beanstalk the and Jack appears in the following Recommended Lists:

ADRIFT Authors' Iconic Works by DB
I have attempted to assemble a list of some major (and some minor) authors for the ADRIFT platform along with a game iconic of their style. The games are listed by seniority of the authors, where seniority is determined by the year of an...

Polls

The following polls include votes for Beanstalk the and Jack:

Doing things backwards by Mike Ciul
Games that take traditional IF tasks and puzzles, and do them backwards or subvert them in a clever way. Thanks to olethros on raif for the inverse puzzle idea.




This is version 4 of this page, edited by Denk on 9 March 2023 at 9:51pm. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item - Delete This Page