Ratings and Reviews by WetCheese
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Unusual with a compelling, well-paced narrative, March 15, 2018When it said one room, my expectations weren't high; they were surpassed in spades. I loved almost everything about this. The descriptions were great with some subtle humour thrown in, without being tiringly verbose. Most things gave a response, and generally a very good one, (though there were a few situations where half a dozen things are mentioned and weren't understood - could easily be tightened up, but didn't detract).
The problems aren't challenging and normally that would put me off but the unusual nature of this game and the beautiful, well paced unfolding of the narrative was compelling so that, as with all well-crafted fiction, I couldn't put it down.
I would reccommend spending a pleasant hour or two with an ice-cold beer/water, feet up on the sofa, music/radio playing gently in the background and lose yourself in this great little adventure!
I certainly did.
Sly take on a classic puzzle, March 9, 2018Yep, it's an IF take on the old fox, chicken, corn puzzle.
Therefore there isn't much to it ... or so I thought!
This is a neat and 'sly' little game that surprisingly kept me amused for over 400 turns - not complex and it's not in the running for the Bookers but fairly well crafted with some deceptive little catches thrown in.
Yes, there are some issues with rope use that could have done with a bit more debugging but they don't stop you solving anything.
The parsing range was reasonable, though there were a few obvious things (e.g. throwing things in the water and 'mend') that it really should have given a response to.
Having said that, two unexpected nods had me grinning:
(Spoiler - click to show)"It is made of twisted little threads, all alike." and (Spoiler - click to show)the response it gives when you try both old magic words.
I enjoyed the conclusion and it left me wanting another adventure in the same style.
All in all, a fun little game from a simple premise just in need of a touch more technical polish.
Delightful and well crafted, March 8, 2018This was a great pleasure to play.
The narrative was witty and entertaining; the locations were nicely set out with not too much to-ing and fro-ing; the puzzles weren't particularly difficult but none-the-less kept me playing.
The npc characterisations were good and although very limited in interactivity, presented enough variety in the responses not to come across as 'token'.
As a small gripe, the 'easy-exit' presented at the beginning seemed unnecessary - with this available, I would perhaps have preferred a form of score so you would know how you did when exiting.
I definitely recommended this.
Good writing; poor game, March 8, 2018The style of writing was good and there was certainly a novelty to the game.
However, after a few minutes I found I could just type (Spoiler - click to show)Take Amy a few times (or something similar) and the plot just seemed to unfold without needing to read any of it. Then an error message kept popping up saying: Runtime problem P22, failing to find something in a lookup table.
The game quickly came to an end where it offered me a chance to type (Spoiler - click to show)WIN which I did, and with a couple of moves the game was over.
Sorry, this just didn't do it for me.
The over-restricted parser - novel as this particular 'take' on that may be - detracted from the interaction and game side of it with the result that I quickly lost any desire to go back and try it out further.
On the whole, this was very enjoyable. The puzzles were mostly straightforward and fun with a good few trickier ones further in.
I have one particular gripe. Yes, I know it warns me it is a game with limited verbs ('examine' 'use' and very few others) but the key reason for having excellent modern parsers is to avoid parser-'don't understand'-Hell and give a rich experience to the reader/player.
For example:
I'm in a room, with a closed wooden door and a wand in my hand.
I try 'open door' and I get "That's not a command I recognise"
I try 'wave wand' and I get "That's not a command I recognise"
I nearly stopped playing at that point.
Yes, I can see the reason for limiting the verbs and, yes (without giving spoilers), it does eliminate a lot of wasted parser-Hell later but there were plenty of other examples of 'examine' not working with things described in rooms.
IF should try to give a reasonable response to everything that can be seen/described, so I think it needed a bit of work sorting that out.
In the end, though, I'm glad I stayed with it because it was a very good little adventure and I enjoyed it enough to give it an extra star.
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