Ratings and Reviews by Havoc Crow

gib him milk, December 1, 2023

Very short but adorable game. (Spoiler - click to show)It's got a friendly cow in it, which automatically makes it worth checking out.

It's just a pity the author didn't replace the default responses -- with the game's childish unpunctuated style, being suddenly confronted with "I am carrying nothing." or "That's not a verb I recognise." jars one out of the mood.

Havoc Crow's Rating:

Best left forgotten, December 1, 2023

A simplistic, joke game, with a deliberately dumb premise: you're an "excessively fat imbecile", stuck in a room with no exits and a single rubber duck, with which you can interact in a few ways, all while being relentlessly insulted by the narrator.

The game's humor hasn't aged well. And no, I don't even mean the vulgar insults (which are, arguably, the funniest and best-written part). The comedy comes across as... desperate, like something written by a kid who's not quite sure what 'humor' is, so he tries to emulate it by either randomly breaking into gibberish or misspelling random words. Remember when "lolrandom" humor was all the rage on the internet? This game feels like a bad relic from that age. Avoid this one; there's nothing here worth your time.

Havoc Crow's Rating:

"Pilgrim's Progress" this ain't, December 21, 2019

An 80's game made with a system called "GAGS", which I'm unfamiliar with, but judging from the datafile's structure it seems rather inflexible (no synonyms; room or object descriptions cannot be changed during the game; only a handful of verbs, which leads to awkward commands — such as having to type (Spoiler - click to show)"push computer" when you want to press a key on the keyboard — as well as repetitive and simplistic puzzles.) A lot of the inventory items and rooms seem useless and are there just for show.

In case the title hasn't clued you in enough, the author based the game on his religious beliefs; in the readme file, he states that this is "more than a game" and that he made it as an alternative to "games involving the use of "magic"". So instead of magic you have artifacts like "the sling of David", "the rod of Truth" etc. used to kill allegorical monsters like the "wolf of unbelief" (although one of the monsters (Spoiler - click to show)is instead killed with an ordinary coin for some reason... I'm wondering if it's a bug.) There are some hints regarding which weapon to use on which critter, but on the whole you probably won't need them, as, barring parser problems, the game is rather easy (apart from a single illogical puzzle where you need to (Spoiler - click to show)"turn diamond" to get out of the mirror room — the diamond is an item you can pick up and carry around, so how can you "turn" it?), and even though it's possible to get stuck by leaving items behind locked doors, it's usually obvious which inventory items you're missing. Be warned, though, that the ending is very unsatisfying.

PS. One rather cringeworthy moment in the game is finding a newspaper and a magazine which have no role in the puzzles, and seem to exist solely to push the author's wish fulfillment about how USA becomes a completely Christian-run country by 1994, and how future generations will shake their heads at today's heathen pleasures of "cigarettes" and "television". It's not wrong per se to promote your personal beliefs through your works, but it's risky and tough to do right — and the way it's done in the game feels very much on-the-nose.

Kinda funny, but mediocre as a game, December 1, 2019

A very short game, consisting of a grand total of two easy puzzles. I got stuck on the second puzzle due to the bad parser ((Spoiler - click to show)"look under cushions" tells you there's nothing under the recliner - you need to "search recliner" instead.) There were a few amusing moments, but ultimately the game didn't feel very enjoyable to play.

The description claims that the game "is not recommended for young audiences"; as far as I can tell, the only reason is a few instances of entirely unnecessary swearwords.

(Note: To download the game, look up the download URL in the Internet Archive).

Havoc Crow's Rating:

More amusing than anything, July 11, 2019

The game attempts to tell a serious, touching story about bullying. Unfortunately, it falls flat due to the overall ineptness of the writing. The prose feels downright childlike sometimes (even in sections written from adults' perspectives), and I found myself laughing out loud several times, rather than empathizing with Billy's exaggerated plight. The out-of-the-blue ending doesn't help either.

Just a novelty, July 11, 2019

An implementation of the entire "E1M1: Hangar" from Doom in text adventure form. Probably the most remarkable feature of this game is its high fidelity in re-creating the original game, especially the layout of the map (even the secret areas are implemented faithfully). Finding your way around can be confusing, though, when there are no visuals to guide you.

However, for all its novelty, the game itself isn't particularly interesting in text adventure terms. (Of course, perhaps that was the author's point.) Worth checking out for a chuckle, maybe, but gets old fast.

(For some reason, there's also a hunger daemon that kills you eventually — probably the author's oversight?)

Havoc Crow's Rating: