Hoosegow

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Average Rating: Number of Reviews: 2 Write a review

Good, but should have been great., August 8, 2010
Hoosegow is a well written and fun escape the room game. Unfortunately the flow of the experience is ruined by bugs, parser problems, and some annoying 'guess the verb' situations. All of these give the game an Unpolished feel.

The writers of this game did a very good job of implementing the setting of the game, A western comedy, and giving the game a "living" feel. The writing for the descriptions, and the PC are all very good. A simple but effective example comes the great replacement of IF default responses. "You reckon violence usually is the answer, but maybe not just now.", or "That ain’t no verb I got knowledge of.".One place the game did come short is the NPC side-kick, Muddy, which seemed kind of lifeless and lacked some responses.

The puzzles were easy-medium and well designed ((Spoiler - click to show)I thought the last puzzle with the marshal was redundant ). The problem with the game is that I encountered a few annoying bugs and a few nouns/actions were not well implemented, leaving some the puzzles a bitter taste of 'guess the verb'. (Spoiler - click to show)For a bug example: in some parts of the game, for some reason the 'it' verb does not work well (after hitting the wall, touch it gives the response for the gate.) An example of poor implementation: When you need to take the feather from the vulture pulling the tale does not do the trick, instead you have to "take feather" which doesn't seem to make too much sense. Another example, is when you try to climb the window after muddy gets tired, the response makes no sense.

In conclusion, hoosegow is a good game, that just isn't polished enough.

An Intense One-Room Adventure ..., May 4, 2010
It took me over an hour to complete the whole game (and I confess that I had to peek into the PDF walkthrough a couple of times) -- by BTW, the PDF-Walkthrough is great because it gives procedural hints but not the exact steps to solve puzzles, so it's not too much of a spolier to peak in it when stuck.

The game is intriguing and NPCs are lively shaped. Puzzles are well crafted and not too hard to solve, and even though there is a specific order in which puzzles should be solved, the story unfolds in a way which makes clear what has to be acomplished first.
Also, there is no "guess-the-verb" struggling: intuitive alternative comands to complex operations seem to be reckognized straight away -- I didn't experience problems in achieving any particular task.
I liked the humor of the game, which is present all along the story. Surely, fantasy is another main ingredient of the game -- it isn't a stereotyped game, it has a flavour of it's own.
I'd say this is a recomended game for IF-veterans and newcomers alike.
Well done, worth playing.

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