Lomalow by Brendan Barnwell Fantasy 1999 Return to the game's main page Reviews and Ratings Average Rating: Number of Ratings: 1 Write a review

SPAG

I really, really wanted to like this game more than I did. It has a fascinating storyline, evocative writing, and an uplifting theme. If the author had turned the concept into a short story instead of an IF work, it probably would have done very well. But despite all this, the best I could give it was a 5: 10 for imagination, 0 for implementation.
-- Suzanne Britton

>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction

So Lomalow is a very flawed game, hampered by its overblown prose and its numbingly iterative design. That's what I have to say as a critic. Now, here's what I have to say as an author. The thing I liked about Lomalow, and the thing that kept it from becoming a purely irritating experience, was the obvious sincerity that was driving it.

This game has a unique vision and concept, but falls flat in implementation.

You survive an avalanche and end up in a secluded wooded area with 2 npcs. The game becomes a mixture of exploration and conversation: you try to find interesting landmarks and ask both npcs about it several times.

The implementation and writing fall flat; a few rounds of beta testing would have smoothed things over. The tone varies widely, some objects and directions have difficult to guess commands, and so on.

However, the main idea was so fun that I peresevered through bizarre bugs in the hint system to read all the text in the game. I would play it again.

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Baf's Guide

You're on a hiking trip, and a rockslide deposits you at the foot of a cliff, near a strange house with some even stranger inhabitants. The storyline is complex and reasonably well developed, but the implementation needs a lot of work--essentially, you advance the plot by asking the characters about the same topics over and over and over, and if you're lucky, they'll furnish a little more information each time. They're also rather cardboard--they don't react to obvious stimuli. Since those characters, and the story you wring out of them, essentially constitute the entire game, struggling with them makes the game pretty frustrating. The hint system (on which you're likely to rely a good deal) breaks down toward the end of the game. Intriguing at times, but uneven.

-- Duncan Stevens