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The Xylophoniad
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Contains xylophoniad/index.html
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Windows Application (Windows 7 and later)
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by David Welbourn

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The Xylophoniad

by Robin Johnson profile

Humor
2016

Web Site

(based on 15 ratings)
2 reviews

About the Story

The King of Anachronopolis has ordered you to end the Trojan War, slay the dreaded Bicyclops, and rescue a couple of inmates from Hades. A comic adventure set in Greek mythology.


Game Details


Awards

Co-Winner, Main Festival - Spring Thing 2016


News

Updated with in-game artwork for NPCs, and available as a zipfile for offline play, or an executable for Windows 7/8/10.
Reported by Robin Johnson | History | Edit | Delete
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Editorial Reviews

Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling
"A good-natured spoof of Greek mythology with cameos from Achilles, Sappho, Daedalus, the Minotaur, and assorted other crowd favorites"
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Astrobolism
"This is a 'large and sparse' parser game set in a parodic world of antiquity, where you meet such things as a 'bicyclops', which is much scarier than a regular cyclops because it has two eyes."
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Narrativium
"Overall, The Xylophoniad is well worth playing. It doesn't break any new barriers and is definitely old-school, but with the cruel, sadistic edge of the old-school taken out."
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Christopher Huang
"From the Trojan War shenanigans to the Bicyclops (a cyclops with two eyes! The horror of it!) the work is steeped through with clever humour."
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Wade's Important Astrolab
"The Xylophoniad delivers its humour in some particularly goofy and cartoon-like ways, elicits jokes from cute and simple NPCs who appear as caricatures of their legendary selves – or 'non-canonical versions' as the game likes to say – and keeps the player busy with a large ancient world split into separate regions."
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Old Games Italia (Italian)

"The game is a big carousel of characters and clichés of Greek culture (from the minotaur to the Medusa), all reinterpreted in comic and surreal style" [edited Google translation]
See the full review

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
A humorous, polished old-style IF set in ancient Greece, February 23, 2021
by MathBrush
Related reviews: Spring Thing 2016

The style of this game should be familiar to those who have tried Portcullis or Draculaland by the same author. You wander around a fairly small map in the Scott Adams tradition of short descriptions, 1-2 items a room, and well-characterized NPCs with a few interesting lines.

Like those games, this game evokes the same feel of adventure and exploration as the early text adventures. However, the author has managed to remove a great deal of the frustration inherent in those games by providing well-thought-out hints and gentle guidance.

You play Xylophone (pronounced in four syllables), a Greek woman accused of various crimes and given 3 labors to perform. You travel to Minos, Hell, and Troy to complete these tasks.

The game is chock full of puns and mythology jokes. It made me chuckle.

Some of the puzzles felt a bit tedious in the middle, as you were mostly matching things (Iron door? Find an iron key. Need to get past a bear? find some honey. Not that these are real examples). This isn't necessarily bad, but some of the other puzzles were quite clever (giving some nice Eureka! moments), so it made me wish for more.

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Fun parser mashup of Greek myths., November 25, 2021
by Wade Clarke (Sydney, Australia)
Related reviews: spring thing 2016, versificator, comedy

(This is an edited version of a review I originally wrote for my blog during Spring Thing 2016.)

The Xylophoniad is a joking, mashup take on numerous characters and situations from Greek mythology. It is powered by Versificator, the author's own parser engine. You play the part of veteran adventuress Xylophone, assigned by a bored king to knock over a few light tasks like ending the Trojan War, rescuing prisoners from Hades and killing the Bicyclops. I imagined the Bicyclops was going to turn out to have two eyes side-by-side, which would have had the effect of making it look like anyone else, which would in turn have resulted in comedic, illogical screaming from onlookers along the lines of: 'Argh! Two eyes! It's hideous!' But it turns out that the second eye of a Bicyclops is above the first one. And that is pretty gross.

The Xylophoniad (or THE X as I will now refer to it) reminds of the classic Scott Adams games in some of its nature and puzzles, though rarely in restrained degree. The aesthetic of those 16 kilobyte games was determined by the hard technical limit of the 16 kilobytes. There are no real limits for The X. There are design choices, and any mimicry of older games is carried out to an irreverent extent rather than a slavish one. The game delivers its humour in some particularly goofy and cartoon-like ways, elicits jokes from cute and simple NPCs who appear as caricatures of their legendary selves, or 'non-canonical versions' as the game likes to say, and keeps the player busy with a large ancient world split into separate regions. The region separation feels like both a staple of gaming in general (like levels, a way to divide up content and aesthetics) and a way to make THE X feel more manageable. Because no matter how cute the game may appear to be at the outset, when a king tells you to perform three impossible-sounding tasks before breakfast (it was the 'end the Trojan war' one that especially raised my anxiety levels) you're likely to feel at least a tad flustered about the day ahead.

Fortunately, and as I should probably have anticipated, the explicit solutions to the major challenges are pretty wack. Don't dwell on how to end the Trojan War all by yourself (... ARGH!!!). Just get out there and be the best traditionally klepto adventuress you can be, exploring, finding ways to pass recalcitrant portals, solving puzzles that crop up using a mixture of logic and illogic, and helping NPCs with their usually not-too-obscure problems. Achilles is histrionic, the medusa is apologetic, Daedalus is MacGyver and Helen of Troy emits unusual noises.

I don't think much knowledge of Greek mythology is required to deal with THE X's puzzles. In cases where a particular piece of knowledge might help with a particular puzzle, the game either tells you about it explicitly or collapses it into a joke that has the side-effect of indicating how the situation would have been in a canonical version of the story. I found myself at an impasse a few times and got past each one using the graduated hint system that comes with the game. If I'd had more time to play, I probably would have continued to experiment with the gameworld and overcome one or two of the impasses on my own.

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The Xylophoniad on IFDB

Recommended Lists

The Xylophoniad appears in the following Recommended Lists:

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Polls

The following polls include votes for The Xylophoniad:

For your consideration: XYZZY-eligible Settings of 2016 by MathBrush
This is for suggesting games released in 2016 which you think might be worth considering for Best setting in the XYZZY awards. This is not a zeroth-round nomination. The category will still be text-entry, and games not mentioned here...

For your consideration: XYZZY-eligible NPCs of 2016 by MathBrush
This is for suggesting games released in 2016 which you think might be worth considering for Best NPCs in the XYZZY awards. This is not a zeroth-round nomination. The category will still be text-entry, and games not mentioned here will...

games with female protagonists by X.W

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This is version 13 of this page, edited by Robin Johnson on 7 December 2019 at 5:00pm. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item - Delete This Page