Reviews by Rovarsson
Fantasy
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In Defense of Scaly Monsters, May 12, 2022In olden times, shrouded from memory by the mists of time, darkness had fallen over the Land of IF. There was bitter strife amongst the ranks of Text Adventurers. One powerful faction looked down with disdain upon the ancient traditions of Knightly Quests and Magick Incantations. One archetype above all others was the target of their loathing: the once Noble and Fearsome Dragon.
These Renewers of IF landed blow after blow on the olden ways, diverting attention and admiration towards their newfangled, even experimental games. So harsh was the barrage that Dragons and their traditions were left behind, all but cleft in twain.
One determined Author stood steadfast against this brutish barbarity that guised itself as "Modern IF". He set out on a Quest to restore the Dragons' honour and created Yes, Another Game With A Dragon.
To fend off all criticism of being a dated cliché, the game employs the gleaming blade of superb literary quality, as evidenced in this extract:
> "The shelves are well stocked with an assortment of dried herbs and pickled embryos."
Or this shining pearl of evocative conciseness:
> "The oily swamp farts wetly."
Within the confines of a compact map, the different locations are coherent yet richly varied. An open woodland with a well in the clearing, a mighty oak and an abondoned monastery, bordered by fields of grain and green pastures. A deep gorge with an impassable river, blocked by a monstrous guard.
There is a deceptive atmosphere of carefree sunny summer over these lands, for there are dangers and discombobulating obstacles in our hero's way. For most of these puzzling circumstances, he will have to sort out the workings of a convenient Magick Machine.
Our hero, by the way, is of the rather hapless sort. He is drawn away from his habituary daytime occupation as the town drunk by the promise of richess in the form of half the king's land and happiness in the form of the princess' hand in marriage. These prizes will be his, if he can be the one to rescue said princess from the cluthes of..., yes,... The Dragon!
Needless to say, many others want these prizes for themselves. Many True Heroes (tm) that is. During the game, there are many instances of "A Wild Adventurer Appears!" These lend the normally calm and silent woods the amusing and confusing air of busy playful competition.
The final confrontation in the endgame mirrors a heroic dream our protagonist had in the introductory sequence. But can he twist it round?
It is not often that I, your humble reviewer, make explicit comparisons between games, but in this case a certain family resemblance should be pointed out.
YAGWAD feels and plays like a sibling to Augmented Fourth and Wizard Sniffer, and it may well be a distant cousin to Lost Pig. It shares with these games a playful whimsicalness, while being very robustly implemented and competently crafted under the hood. There is a great attention to atmosphere, tone, the feel of the world and the details of the surroundings.
The joy and amusement of the author shine through this entire adventure.
Yes, Another Game With A Dragon shows conclusively that yes, there is still room for Dragons in the Land of IF. (At least, there was 22 years ago when this game was published.)
♫---the headbone connected to the ... neck bone---♪, April 15, 2022The Bones of Rosalinda has a very compelling storyline. The minimally interactive prologue sets the mood, prepares the scene and introduces the characters. The equally minimally interactive epilogue provides very satisfying closure for the story, not only for the protagonist but for the side characters too.
Both are quite long and very well written, giving the player the opportunity to dig in to the story.
In between is, of course, the game. It's up to the player to pick up the introductory setup and carry it through to the finale, jumping through a great deal of hoops large and small while doing so.
The characters in Bones are a joy to get to know. They all have enough detail and glimpses of a backstory so that not one of them feels (or smells) like just having been pressed out of a plastic mold.
I particularly liked Piecrust, a talking mouse with a rather bleak outlook on the world and his future in it, and a distracting enthousiasm for foodstuffs of any kind. The apathetic deadpan delivery of his remarks made me laugh more than once, especially near the beginning of the game.
The elaborate conversations and cutscenes provide the player with background and insights to fully appreciate the characters.
The difficulty of the puzzles was just right for me, once I really got the central gameplay mechanic. It's PC-juggling.The player has to switch player characters with different abilities (and sometimes assemble them...) to solve the problems facing the protagonist.This mechanic is introduced gently and later expanded upon, providing a gentle learning curve.
Besides the PC-juggling there is also inventory-juggling. Lots of it. A shortcut to directly GIVE an object from one PC to the next without first dropping it would be nice. Also, (Spoiler - click to show)the ability to ATTACH limbs straight out of the backpack would come in handy.
Most of the puzzles are variations on the lock-and-key theme. The Bones of Rosalinda shows with gusto that original variations on that theme are still possible. Very satisfying.
I had a blast playing through this game. Highly recommended!
Phixio the gassy dragon., March 4, 2022You awaken to a wonderful day after a good night's sleep, ready to begin your duties as druid-priestess of Fort Aegea.
Alas, the day has not progressed far before life in your orderly settlement is disturbed by the arrival of the Green Dragon Phixio. He demands four thirty-year-old virgins to fulfill the conditions of an age-old pact (which you had no idea about, seeing that Fort Aegea was not yet built the last time Phixio came to eat some people from this area).
The introductory part of Fort Aegea made me want to play a longer simulationist game in this setting. As priestess, you are healer and spiritual helper to the inhabitants of a peaceful grain-processing settlement. You settle disputes between inhabitants and oversee the overall functioning of the harvest and distribution of the crops.
There are some books in your room with textdumps of background information about the history and geography of the game world. Reading these is not necessary for the game, but I enjoyed the wider view they provided very much.
This part of the game is very deeply implemented. Since your time before the arrival of the dragon is limited, I restarted several times to poke around in all corners of the town and try to see as much as possible. I encountered some trumy pleasant surprises.
The pace of the game changes radically once the Green Dragon shows up. As a wager to stall him, you must stay alive until nightfall. You are granted a small headstart to outrun the beast or hide long enough.
From a central hub location, you have immediate access to four areas. In each one, there is a straightforward/railroaded path through a few puzzles and back to the hub. The difficulty lies in finding the right sequence of moves before the dragon catches up. To accomplish this as the player, there will be a lot of try-die-repeat and even more UNDOing.
My recommendation: be sure to have a saved game at the hub and just take the deaths as they come.
Most of the puzzles are clever enough, some on the other hand are rather obscure. Aside from run-of-the-mill adventure techniques, you have a variety of spells at your disposal. The spells are based on a druids attunement with nature (water- and plantbending instead of burning the place down). They fit nicely with the puzzles without feeling too much like being custom-built solutions for one specific problem.
The writing is good. I personally found it too detailed and distanced to really pull me along emotionally, but it does a good job of painting a vivid image of the surroundings.
Similarly to The Jewel of Knowledge (which plays in the same world), a very enjoyable game in an interesting setting.
Fire, frost and acid., February 28, 2022A cave, three dragons, a maze and the magical gemstone from the title. Sounds a bit much like a well known fantasy path already trodden into the mud, no?
A classic fantasy adventure is a pleasure to play if it's well made. And The Jewel of Knowledge is well made.
The cave is easily visualized, with three main paths to explore. On the way however, you will need to find and open several secret passageways and get to some hard-to-reach corners.
The maze is subtly hinted with an original solution.
The puzzles are clever without stopping you in your progress too long.
The dragons are impressive and hard to beat.
That makes for an adventure worthy of spending my time on. But! What really lifts The Jewel of Knowledge above your average cave-crawl is the personal perspective it takes to the protagonist and to the entire business of adventuring.
The (minimally) interactive prologue casts a thoughtful light on the entire game. It caused me to feel much more sympathetic towards the protagonist and to understand his personality and motifs better.
The ending tries to rise above cave-crawl expectations too, but doesn't succeed as well. It comes off more as a finger-wagging moral lesson.
Still, very good game.
Hot coffee from the samovar?, February 18, 2022Firebird is a loose and at times decidedly anachronistic retelling of a Russian folktale. A few (more-or-less) well-known personages from Russian culture make an appearance, there is the common recurrence of groupings of three (three gradually harder obstacles, three gradually more difficult foes,...) Despite the superficial references to Russian culture, however, the PC is basically a standard "adventure-prince". The PC actually acknowledges his own role as he yearns for a simpler life of making his own sandwiches and eating them in the forest. Unfortunately, there seems to be no way to derail the game's narrative towards an alternative ending where your prince gets to do exactly that. (He could take advantage of his lone quest to just vanish and go live as a farmer...)
Depending on the player's choice in the finale, there are two proper endings. They are very black-and-white moral opposites. Much more impressive are the many ways to actually get to the finale. NPCs and puzzles can almost all be handled in multiple ways, there are several paths to a certain far-off part of the map, there is an in-game portal back to the begionning of the game should you have forgotten a necessary object. The game is so forgiving of "mistakes" that they stop being mistakes, just new opportunities to handle a problem.
The implementation is a bit on the shallow side, and the game is a bit heavy on the micro-management. Many actions require in-between steps that could have been handled automatically.
The puzzles are mostly easy and straightforward. (Just make sure you have a nice and full inventory at all times. No limits to what you can carry!) I had the most fun with the elaborate cutscenes and descriptions at crucial turning points in the narrative.
A great game for a lazy afternoon.
Eric the ultimately unsatisfactory, February 6, 2022The Legend game Eric the Unready takes the damsel-in-distress trope and uses it as a framework for a grand tour of wacky silliness and over-the-top parody.
The "chapters" of the story are implemented as stand-alone mini-adventures. Each of these is completely self-contained. The biggest of them has eight locations, and none of the puzzles is especially challenging (except for unintentional reasons, see below...)
The strongest point of Eric the Unready is certainly the humour. The constant barrage of slapstick, parody and some of the most groanworthy puns I ever heard kept me chuckling all the way through. Be that as it may, there still is such a thing as too much of a good thing. It seems as if every joke that sounded even remotely funny upon first thinking of it was included in the game. So there are a lot of just plain bad jokes in there.
A particular example of something that didn't work for me is the almost verbatim incorporation of a Monty Python scene. A television sketch works on facial expressions, tone of voice and, most importantly, tempo and rhythm. In translating this scene to IF, so much is lost that what is left feels pathetically uninspired.
The division of the overarching story into separate stand-alone bits makes it an extremely linear game. I don't really mind this, but I would have appreciated a bit more narrative tension as you progress to the later chapters. As it stands, the final chapter is no more serious or exciting than the introduction.
Although the puzzles can be rated as easy, I found that they are sometimes harder than (I suppose) intended. The utter silliness often stands in the way of logical cause-and-effect thinking, leading to a strategy of let's-try-anything-on-everything.
A very funny game, but not a very good one.
A dream of ice and fire., November 8, 2021It's been too long since you and John got together for some heavy liquor sampling. For some reason however, he didn't show up. When you go to his house, you find that John has disappeared and that a mysterious hole in his basement has appeared. Hmmm... What to do?
John's Fire Witch takes the basic structure of an old-fashioned cavecrawl and ditches a lot of ballast, resulting in a small and focused adventure.
Instead of having a sprawling map with many connecting junctions, confusing layout and mazes, John's Fire Witch is confined to about 35 rooms. A few clever twists in the layout do provide a limited sense of exploration though.
The simplistic scenario functions as the backdrop for a small number of really good puzzles. You'll have to use some basic real-world physics and pay close attention to the wording of object descriptions. The final puzzle requires an intuitive leap to use one of your objects in a new way.
The writing is very good on the level of individual descriptions of rooms and objects. However, I found that the old-school approach to the overall atmosphere didn't work so well. The game wavered between lighthearted and self-deprecating humour on the one hand while never quite succeeding in evoking a scary-underground-tunnel feeling on the other.
The game misses a lot of opportunities to flesh out its atmosphere. Many plausible actions are not supported, background scenery is mostly unimplemented... On the whole, I felt that there should be more stuff there to look at (even if it was just the cave ceiling). This is perhaps justified by the theme of the final room, which is just full of stuff (presumably hoarded there by the antagonist). Here, the overabundance of stuff serves to make the endgame hard and confusing by giving you so many options that you could never hope to try them all within the limited time allotted to you. SAVE-RESTORE is your friend...
Good fun.
Foxy... *Jimi Hendrix distortion solo* ...Familiar, October 8, 2021A band of raiders kidnapped your human! As his familiar, you are bound to rescue him. Find your way into the enemy base to do so.
Finding Light's premise is simple and straightforward, as indeed the game as a whole is. This makes sure that the player can enjoy the forward momentum and the quick succession of discoveries instead of banging her head against a puzzle-wall.
The obstacles are all pretty standard text-adventure fare. Lock&key, color-code, maze, fetch&trade... The twist here that you, as a familiar (a magic human's spirit guide) can CHANGE between animal and human form. This gives an entirely new dimension to exploring the surroundings, searching for clues and solving the puzzles.
To succesfully infiltrate the raiders' fort, you will need help. Quite a few animal NPCs are willing to offer that help, and while interacting with them you might learn something about their personalities. I found this the most satisfying part of the game. Through conversing with the animals, you learn bits and pieces of their backstories. This makes them much, much more than cardboard characters whose only role is to "give player object x if and only if player gives object y to NPC". I'm confident that a full IF-piece could be made about the backstory of each animal NPC (especially the horses.)
In contrast, one raider is a dumb brute. Another is a mute psychopath. (Hmm, the mute psychopath's backstory may have a horror-game buried in it somewhere...)
I liked the clean writing. The rooms were clearly described and easily imagined. Likewise, the map is simple and easily memorized, a bonus for people who don't like drawing maps.
In the IFComp version I played (v1), I found the implementation wanting in some places. To mention one instance: the verb TRADE might come in handy. Another example is given by Mathbrush in his review: many more synonyms for the solution to the first puzzle should be implemented. You really don't want to get players bashing their computers against the wall because they can't guess the syntax of your "easy and obvious" introductory puzzle.
The main mechanism in the game is a joy to explore. Switching between shapes brings new abilities to experience the game-world and interact with it. I'd like to see it expanded even more, perhaps applying the different senses to every concrete object instead of some objects and the rooms.
A very enjoyable classic text-adventure with a clever twist.
Someone please give that man some antihistamines!, September 20, 2021He's got a bad case of the hay fevers! Can't even look at stuff without his eyes watering.
Yes, the protagonist of Birmingham IV has a chronic eye-disorder. Every single time he examines something: "Predictably, the Phil's eyes water." His other problem is that throughout the game, he is consistently called "The Phil". I have no problem with third person narrative. It establishes a different kind of player-PC relationship that helps define the feel of a game. However, here it sounds more like the protagonist is a rambling braggart with delusions of grandeur narrating his own exploits. (This is probably not the case, but I found it fun to imagine my PC going about his explorations while describing his every move.)
This rambling-about-his-own-exploits protagonist is actually perfectly in line with my biggest gripe about the game: What the FULLGRU am I doing here?!
Apparently The Phil has woken up in a fantasy-dreamland (trolls & dwarves elves & all). He starts wandering around poking everything he comes across and taking whatever he sees. Out of pure curiosity he seeks out puzzles to solve but it is never clear what his goal actually is. Halfway through the game, a proper endgoal crystallizes: clear up the mess he has caused by thoughtlessly (some might say ruthlessly) tackling obstacles for no apparent reason.
The land the Phil is roaming is nicely described. There are (on my map) five distinct regions that all lie along a long E-W road. So that's good for visualizing the geography. Unfortunately, due to an inventory limit and some less-than-practical puzzle layout (1980s oldschool style and all that...) you will travel this road until you can dream it and then some more.
The puzzles you encounter range from "Great!" ((Spoiler - click to show)laying out breadcrumbs for the puddytat...) to "Huh?" ((Spoiler - click to show)lighting the lamp...) to "Jeeves! Get-me-my-walkthrough!" ((Spoiler - click to show)a not-cool-not-clever maze that is only justified because everybody knows that Elves are obnoxious tricksters seeking to confobble people at every turn.)
The writing is good. I really enjoyed the descriptions of the Elven Mound and the Plains by the River. There is a lot of humour in the responses too, and there are tons of unnecessary but funny stuff to try (including dying in many ways) (Oh, that reminds me... About those puzzles: Learn by dying. A lot.)
But despite the funny and overall good writing, the lack of an overarching goal or quest made it all feel a bit too light and unimportant to me.
So: a nice big game, lots of laughs without any (heart)strings attached.
Worth playing.
A dreamlike search for..., September 9, 2021First off, some tech-stuff: This game is, hands-down, the most deeply implemented piece of Interactive Fiction I have ever played or heard of. Along with that, it also provides an amazing freedom of experimentation. This is no sandbox, this is dune after dune.
The puzzles are,partly because of the aforementioned freedom, not hard. They are sensible and great fun. Choose your own logical approach and try it. Many different solutions will work, and those that don't will not work for a reason. Very rewarding.
The story is very much for the player to fill in. Lady Short gives you the backbone elements of a story of personal growth and inner realization, up to you to interpret it. The many different endings also give you many possible interpretations.
The writing is crisp and clear, giving Metamorphoses that dreamlike quality. The descriptions are detailed enough to be practical, without excess decoration. Exactly because of the sparse descriptions, the imagination has ample room to dream up it's own version of your surroundings.
Maybe the biggest puzzle here is the quest for completeness.A reverse read-the-author's-mind problem. When playing (and replaying) ask yourself, "What has Emily Short NOT thought of?"
Very, very good game.
Dissection of a city district., September 9, 2021A sick goblin, bleeding from his eyes, is brought into the clinic and dies on the operating table, right before the eyes of Marid, a young doctor in training.
This is how The Weight of a Soul throws you in the middle of the action from the very first scene. Although there are some resting points in the rest of the game, they are few. Most of it is fast, moving from gruesome discovery to action sequence to an impressive and morally challenging finale.
The goblin's death is only the first in a row. Marid is sent out to investigate the cause of the disease and maybe find a way to stop it from spreading. It is the beginning of a journey that will take her deep into the bowels of the Channelworks District.
Into the bowels indeed. The great waterworks installation known as the Hydra Aquifera looms over the district and dominates the gameworld, both above and below ground. Its pipes, channels and canals run everywhere. The city's descriptions conjure up images of bodily fluids, purulent boils and Galenic humours. The city has been laid open on a dissection table with its innards bare.
The writing in The Weight of a Soul is excellent. In most locations, it follows a very standard IF-structure, with a short descriptive paragraph for each location, followed by a list of exits and of notable features. The images in those descriptive paragraphs are however of a rarely seen evocativeness:
---"The suspended mansion echoes with a grandiose hollowness."---
There are tense action-scenes, something hard to pull off in IF. Here they are well guided without sacrificing all interactivity.
The overall story arc was mostly satisfying. It's a great adventure story; I was happy to let myself be swept along. As a mystery however, it did not work so well for me. I was surprised at the scale of the villain's evil plan, but the basic plot, the nature of the disease and the identity of the villain were all clear very soon.
Fast-paced as it is, the game eschews traditional puzzles in favour of story-bound obstacles, conversations and examinations (of the city and of bodies alike).
It rewards the exploration with pieces of character backstory, long and well-written cutscenes and insightful dreams.
During the story, there are many conversations. These are handled with choice-menus. The choices of what you say do not alter the path of the story for the most part, but they do serve as an excellent device for the player to colour in the character of the protagonist in her own mind. The NPCs are many, and they have much to talk about. (I personally found Webster the bouncer a fascinating man.)
Throughout the game, I kept noticing the ambiguous player perspective. Although the story is written in the traditional second tense, I experienced it as somewhere between second and third tense. Whereas I normally use "I" or sometimes "you" to refer to my player character in my notes, here I used "Marid" and "she" almost every time. This testifies to how much I read this game as a book. I must note that this didn't take away from my involvement with the story.
The Weight of a Soul is a great technical achievement. The depth and smoothness of implementation are astonishing in places, so well done that they become almost invisible to the player. In one scene, there are multiple dead bodies in the same room while Marid examines them one by one. The game effortlessly tracks which body she is working on, avoiding many, many disambiguation issues with a graceful ease that must have been a pain in the unmentionables to program.
The polish on the player-help features is so bright it's almost blinding. A beautiful map, a nudge-to-explicit hint menu, a list of the characters Marid has met and the locations she has visited. On top of that there's a journal that keeps track of Marid's discoveries and her current objectives. More than enough reasons to feel safe as a player and trust the game.
When I started playing IF, I always had a strong feeling of excitement when opening a new game. The experience of being there, embodying a character in a strange world and determining her actions was my main attraction to IF. In The Weight of a Soul it is exactly this feeling that serves as the basis of the interactivity of the game. Rather than levering up the sofa to find a bolt to screw into a machine, the interactivity here comes from being a collaborator of the protagonist, looking through her eyes and helping her decide. I found this extremely engaging and immersive.
In the finale, you, the player, must really decide which path Marid will take in a grey moral area. Very satisfying.
This all takes place in a beautifully crafted grimy and gritty fictional world. The phrase alchemy-punk came to mind...
The Weight of a Soul is an extraordinary IF-story.
*Whoomph* (fire breath)!, September 2, 2021While passing through a nondescript village on your travels, you find yourself mixed up in a town meeting. You involuntarily volunteer to get rid of the dragon threatening the lands. (All the other volunteers unvolunteered by the cunning use of the take-one-step-backwards-while-he's-not-looking tactic.)
Skimming the introductory text of Dragon Adventure, you'd conclude that this is as classic a fantasy text-adventure as its title suggests. When reading more carefully, there are some minor but notable subversions though: the dragon isn't particularly malicious, having never killed any person or livestock. Apparently it's been around for ages without causing any trouble. It's just that, well, somehow word has got out about the presence of the dragon and now people know there's a dragon. And that's bad for business.
The game plays as a pretty straightforward example of the hero-defeats-dragon trope. But, as in the intro, some little things don't quite line up with expectations. The two adversaries in the game can both be dealt with in two ways, one being the gung-ho hero-solution, the other... not so much.
The puzzles are not too difficult. Most require you to find the right object and use it in the right spot, without much further manipulation. The right object, however, is often completely unrelated to a medieval-fantasy setting, lending a bit of anachronistic oldschool charm to the solutions no vending machines though...).
Despite the easy puzzles, you are likely to get stuck or trapped or dead(ish) a few times while exploring. The game is designed in a way that actually encourages this. Two nonstandard verbs are provided to deal with such situations: you can RUN from imminent danger and you can RESCUE yourself or a lost object from a dead end. You are returned to a safe place but your inventory is scattered around the map. Should you really, actually die, the game tells you: "You have done something slightly fatal." You are resurrected and, as before, you need to go searching for your lost inventory. I played along with this a few times, but I soon reverted to plain old UNDO.
Dragon Adventure's game-world feels really small. This is partly due to the limited number of rooms (15 or so outdoor locations), but more than that it is a result of a lack of a grand picture in the writing. The way the locations and your movements between them are described, it feels as if the Mountains are right nextdoor to the Beach, only a small hop away.
The implementation of locations and objects is surprisingly deep for a game of this limited size and ambition: (almost) all nouns have descriptions of their own, and well-written evocative ones at that. It's nice to read about a beautiful location and find you're able to examine all the details mentioned in it separately.
To pull off an unoriginal story such as this hero-dragon tale in a text-adventure, the gameplay has to be spot on. This is where Dragon Adventure drops the ball.
It seriously lacks alternative verbs for necessary actions and some very intuitive actions are not implemented at all (You cannot LOOK IN a container which obviously has something rattling around in it for instance.)
I also encountered a number of bugs: the dragon killed me with a fireball when it was already dead for three or four turns, and I was able to have a piece of parchment simultaneously in and out of its container.
Nonetheless, a few hours of non-assuming fun.
Gods of Tedium, August 25, 2021As I was reading the intro-screen for Myth I became excited about playing this game. I love the set-up: an Olympian God, none other than Poseidon, Ruler of the Seas, is set a task to prove his worth to Zeus. Poseidon is temporarily bereft of his Godly Powers, to prevent him just barging through the quest while riding a tsunami I suppose...
Poseidon has to trust on his wits and smarts. I had hoped this would make him a Trickster God for the duration of this adventure, joining the ranks of Hanuman, Anansi, Coyote, Loki (please forget about Marvel's travesty of the Norse deity. The Loki from the Eddas is a much more ambiguous and mysterious character.)
I love Trickster-characters, godly or otherwise. They bend the rules, lay bare the presuppositions of individuals and society, kick against the status quo. I have often wondered why there are not more adventure games which feature a Trickster-protagonist. Perhaps it is at least partly because the Trickster's tricks often involve manipulating social conventions and human preconceptions through clever communication, and creating subtle and layered character interaction in IF is hàrd.
But I digress...
The game starts with some classic but solid text-adventuring. The action takes place in Hades, the Underworld. Even though it consists of a limited set of locations, the descriptions do a good job of evoking the desolate and barren plains and the hopelesness that pervades them. To gain access to Hades' (the god) palace, you must first cross the river Styx. Here, the adventure-groove creaks to a halt as you must solve two long and annoying puzzles to get everything you need to enter the palace.
Reading a bit more about the history of the game, I found that Myth was a freebie for new members of the "Official Secrets"-adventure club, and it was revamped for rerelease as recent as 2020. This makes me wonder if the two long and annoying puzzles I mentioned are just filler-material to make a bigger game out of what was a bite-sized gift-packet. In any case, I would have much preferred a gratuitous maze instead of these two. Apart from being less tedious, a maze would have fit the setting better than an unmotivated logic puzzle (the cardgame was okay, it just took waaay too long).
Once past the river Styx, the game resumes its classic adventuring tone with another solid series of puzzles, then ends somewhat abruptly.
There are certainly some clever and elegant sub-puzzles in Myth that gave me that "Aha!"-moment. The writing takes some funny jabs at the mythological source material without becoming silly parody. It's very evocative within the sparse constraints of the descriptions.
These good qualities however are sadly swamped down by the fact that, without looking at the walkthrough, more than half the playtime will go to a seemingly endless cardgame and a rusty get-the-objects-to-the-other-side-of-the-river-following-these-rules-I-just-made-up logic puzzle.
A joyous Winter Solstice!, August 20, 2021While walking home after doing an errand in town, little Gretchen is blown off the path by a sudden snowstorm. She finds herself in a wondrous snowy land under a pale wintery moon.
Winter Wonderland is a heartwarming text-adventure. The wonder and amazement at the beautiful fairytale land is played completely straight, without ironic winks or nudges. It's clear that the author has gone to great lengths to envelop the player in a sincere and heartfelt warm and joyful experience.
The immersion in the story and the game-world is achieved in a few ways.
The implementation goes deep enough that you can examine and interact with most pieces of the surroundings, many giving an extra immersive dimension to the already evocative descriptions.
You will meet many fantastic creatures, all enjoying the winter solstice in their own festive manner. All of them will smile and acknowledge you when you greet them. You can strike up a conversation with a good deal of them.
The map is easily visualized, with the dense forest where little Gretchen appeared to the south and the snow-capped mountains so far to the north that they appear as unreachable bluish shapes far to the north. Still, there are enough little sidepaths and bottlenecks to keep it interesting.
Allthough the puzzles are mostly friendly and easy, fetching an object for an NPC to exchange it for the next item. Most of these puzzles do have an intermediary step that is not so obvious, making solving them satisfying. Two puzzles jumped out as being especially nifty, requiring a bit of thinking around the corner. These raised my appreciation for the puzzles and the game as a whole.
A very smooth, warm and friendly playing-experience. Perhaps best enjoyed with a steaming mug of cocoa and a snuggle-blanket.
An inconspicuous church, somewhere in England..., August 9, 2021In the back-chamber of this small church on the English countryside, you meet the sleepy vicar. He recounts of the crypt below that was made by a predecessor of his, and of the legends that there are catacombs below that go back to Roman ages.
He then promptly falls back asleep, leaving you to your own devices to explore the undergound passages.
The oldschool game Crypt is a thoroughly unambitious and unassuming crypt-crawl. This was a big part of its appeal to me. It basically says: "Here, some underground crawlspaces. Now leave me be and go find some treasure. Oh, and try not to die too often."
The command INFO returns a short text where the narrator/parser introduces itself and immediately apologizes for not being as sophisticated as the one from Adventure, understanding only six directions (no diagonals) and a small number of verbs. Its vocabulary is indeed quite limited. The instances where you would GIVE or SHOW {object} in another game require you to DROP {object} here. There is no EXAMINE or LOOK {object}, so you must glean all the information from the sparse room descriptions. Since I'm normally an examine-it-then-poke-it type of adventurer, this required me to adjust my style.
The descriptions are practical and short to the point of sounding cold and distant. This can be unintentionally funny, as some of the treasures would shatter all knowledge we think we have about the Middle Ages or the Roman presence in England.
Apart from figuring out where to DROP the appropriate object, the only puzzles lie in mapping out the mazes. Just as the game itself, these are unoriginal and not too complicated.
Technically, everything works smoothly. I found one typo and no bugs.
A run-of-the-mill treasure-search which I enjoyed very much for the few hours it lasted.
Dimension-shifting theme-park, July 27, 2021Happy birthday to you!
It's your special day and your parents have gone all out and got you the Queen-package for Grooverland. It's an all-access special treatment pass for your favourite theme-park, with a coronation ball in the big castle included. You just have to enjoy the rides and find your Queen-stuff while you're at it.
A seemingly light and humorous plot, told in a funny and colourful tone. Until you get a bit farther along on your quest and start gathering the regalia you need to enter the Queen's castle. A darker dimension lies behind our own, and obtaining the symbols of your royalty causes it somehow to overlap more and more with the happy theme-park reality, subverting our familiar world into solid scary-clown territory. (Coulrophobics can rest assured, no actual scary clowns appear in the game)
The writing seems to have some trouble keeping up with the gradually changing atmosphere. The descriptions do change while the game-world devolves into a darker version of itself, and random background events now depict monstrosities selling snacks, but I never had the feeling of being dragged down into darkness with the protagonist though. I was more a curious but distant observer than an involved participant.
In part, this is because the puzzles are so darn good. They are very accessible, even on the easy side. At the same time, they are wonderfully original in the most creative way: take something that's well-established and add an unexpected twist. The laser-fight puzzle is among the best I've ever seen, while it is in essence a "push the right button"-puzzle in disguise.
Now, the accessibility and originality of the puzzles demands that the writing be crystal clear (which it is), without any ambiguities in the descriptions, so the player can clearly visualize the surroundings. This takes precedence over describing the atmosphere of the changing game-world. The clarity of the puzzle-descriptions shines a bright spotlight in the supposedly dim and gloomy alternate realm taking over our world, causing it to be not so dim and gloomy.
Grooverland's gameplay made a very solid, robust impression on me. The game-world felt like it was there, and I could try whatever I wanted without fear of breaking anything or confusing the underlying order. There are helpful NPCs, funny references to other games, a lot of tinkering and experimenting puzzles, all leading up to an exciting endgame.
The grand finale is just the way I like it. I have proved my worth during the middlegame, solving the fiddly puzzles with the many possibilities. Now it is time for a straightforward but very exciting and well-paced boss fight. Excellent way to reward the player and to leave him with a sense of accomplishment after finishing the game.
I enjoyed this very much.
Midsummer Magicks, July 24, 2021(This review is for the competition release of the game. I fully expect many of the bumps to be smoothed out in a postcomp-release.)
I spent a lot of time with The Faeries of Haelstowne, most of it enchanted by the story, the setting and the beautiful prose, some of it frustrated as hells (yes, plural) by missing objects or unresponsive parser issues. I developed a rather passionate love-hate relationship with the game. By the time I solved it though, the balance had wholly shifted to love and I wholeheartedly forgave and nearly forgot the frustration.
The vicar of an old and quaint English town has disappeared. Police detective Arthur Mapple is called upon to solve the mystery.
The setting of The Faeries of Haelstowne is wonderful. A rural English town with its old history mingled together with even more ancient folktales makes a good place for a Faery-tale. Even better: the tale takes place in the early 20th century. Belief in the spiritual realm, contacting the dead through séances and looking for nature-spirits was combined with an urge to research these phenomena from a new scientific/empirical viewpoint. The rising popularity and technical simplification (to a point) of photography made for enthusiastic amateurs seeking to capture the spiritual world on photo-negative.
It is against this background that we see the arrival of our protagonist in Haelstowne. The first chapter is a lighthearted exploration of the magic-realistic rural surroundings of an old Vicarage. Puzzles consist of multiple steps but there is good guidance. The player is mostly being primed for what to expect in later chapters.
In these later chapters, the mood grows darker and the puzzles more complicated and difficult. Partly, this is because, well, the puzzles are more complicated and difficult. However, it is also in part because there are frequent issues of guess-the-verb and of read-the-author's-mind. One puzzle in particular ((Spoiler - click to show)the antimagic object above the window) has many, many reasonable alternative solutions, all of which are ignored in favor of the one the author had in mind. To add insult to injury, that solution does not even use the object that the author has made us use in a previous and similar puzzle: (Spoiler - click to show)using the portable steps to get to high places....
The entire game is written in delightful prose. Eloquent and evocative descriptions, long-drawn-out but never boring conversations and cut-scenes. It's a joy to have such a wonderful game-world described in such beautiful prose.
The characters that Arthur meets during his investigation are interesting and lively. They all have their own personality and if they are helpful to Arthur it is because their own profession or personal choices brought them on his path, not cajoling or manipulation by Arthur.
After solving many puzzles, meeting a few helpful and not so helpful characters and finding out what indeed has happened to Vicar Peldash; in short: after navigating the complexities of the middle game, all the loose string are bound nicely together in a thrilling and expertly paced endgame. I was on the edge of my seat as I typed the last set of commands.
A truly magical experience.
"But if we throw the Cat in the barrel first,..., June 28, 2021...then how will the Aardvark learn to swim?"
A small taste of the sometimes absurd sense of humour that pervades Augmented Fourth
King Goosen of Papoosen did not enjoy your rendering of "Ode to a Duck". Consequently, you and your trusty trumpet are thrown down the pit, where you discover a community of sorts living at the bottom of the volcano.
Determined to make it back top-side, you must now overcome the obstacles that stand between you and the closed off ladder to the castle. You have your wits and your magically enhanced trumpet.
Instead of memorizing magic scrolls, in Augmented Fourth you must obtain and learn music sheets. Each of the melodies has its own effect on your surroundings and as such functions as a wizard's spell. This magic system is worked out in detail. If you play a particular ditty in a location that is not the intended puzzle-room, the surroundings will still react, sometimes hilariously. The actual effects of the spells are mostly natural phenomena (rain, gravity, ducks...), so it is not too difficult to judge which spell/song to play to solve a particular puzzle.
The game keeps a nice balance between magical solutions and more prosaic adventuring puzzles. Along with summoning ducks through trumpet-playing, you will also need to do the usual bit of exploring of the cave and manipulating of the objects.
The cave under the volcano has a splendid map. The adventure starts off in the center of the volcano, also the central hub of the area. All directions save one are open for exploration from the beginning, and multiple puzzles are accessible from the start. Almost without noticing though, you will have less and less options to pursue, effectively pushing you to the bottleneck in the northern quadrant. From there on out, the game shifts gears and the story gets on fast-moving railroad tracks to the hilarious finale.
A finale that is foreshadowed throughout the game in small amusing intermezzos narrating what is happening with the King up top, who is spiraling down to ever more insanely funny despotic madness.
Modern IF is often lauded for the way the puzzles are seamlessly integrated into the story. Augmented Fourth turns this on its head: the story is woven seamlessly around the puzzles, which are without a doubt the real reason of existence for this game. In many of those puzzles, well-known adventuring tropes are averted, subverted, completely avoided or twisted in a knot. Breaking down the player's expectations often leads to fantastically comic situations, when a certain build-up of tension is suddenly relieved in an unforeseen direction.
There are also a number of playthings that are just that: items to play around with. They're not even red herrings (of which there are also a fair number...), just opportunities to idly while away the time. In the same vein, there are a number of books that provide hints; they mostly provide page after page of completely unnecessary sillines.
A very silly, moderately difficult and very smoothly playing puzzle-romp.
St. Newton, St. Babbage, St. Breguet (hallowed be their names)., June 24, 2021Isaac Newton: Mathematical Lawmaker.
Charles Babbage: Father of the Computer.
Abraham-Louis Breguet: Master-Horologist.
These intellectual giants played front-stage roles in a cultural movement during the 17th and 18th century where natural phenomena were being pulled out of the realms of chaotic randomness or transcendental intentionality and grasped in terms of their inner mathematical and mechanical orderliness.
The passage of Time ( Abraham-Louis Breguet), the patterns of Thought ( Charles Babbage), the regularities of Motion and the intricacies of Calculation ( Isaac Newton) were captured both in logical/mathematical deductions in the mind and in mechanical contraptions of cogs and chains.
While aiding in freeing the human intellect of religious dogmatic thinking and opening up the path of naturalistic explanation and exploitation of the world, its mysteries and its resources, this mechanistical worldview carries within itself a rigidity not dissimilar to religious dogma. Once Nature is caught in Logic and Clockwork, it is unchanging and deterministic.
The world of The Shadow in the Cathedral exists as an exemplar of this rigid-mechanistic historical path. The cathedral from the title is a worshipping place for the three saints mentioned above. Worshippers make the sign of the lever when they PRAY. Priests gather around an altar and bow to the clockwork in the tower. Mechanical order replaces/equates divine order, with very similar institutions to uphold that order.
“The candles move in the space between floor and ceiling, the way the stars move between Earth and the Great Darkness of Heaven.They follow winding metal tracks that cross and recross along the length of the Great Hall, and as they move, pools of light form and then dissolve, so that some parts of the chamber are brightly lit at times whilst others are quite dark. The candles move day and night, with automatic systems to replace those that burn down to the stub.”
This paragraph might seem somewhat wordy, but it captures the atmosphere of the game-world perfectly by elaborating on something as down-to-earth as candlelight while the bigger background is never laid out this explicitly. Instead it has to be inferred from these detailed minor descriptions. To this reviewer’s preferences, a leather-bound tome on the development and history of the clock-bound civilization to LOOK UP BABBAGE would have been very welcome indeed.
Wren is a lowly clock-polishing grease monkey in the Abbey. While cleaning the Abbot’s grandfather-clock, he overhears a conspiracy between a mysterious Figure in Grey and his Abbot to mumblemumble…
When even the Archbisshop will not hear him, it is upon Wren himself to unravel the nefarious scheme.
Story takes precedence in every way in this game. The authors have gone to great lengths to eliminate annoyances for the player. When there is an important action to be taken, numerous but well-considered commands act as a trigger for that action to further the plot. There are calm exploratory and conversational parts where both Wren and the player can catch their breaths and learn more about the city. There are frantic chase sequences where it seems both Wren and the player will be out of breath a moment later but still push onward.
And of course, there are obstacles. Many, many obstacles. Not one of them breaks the flow of the story. And some of those puzzles are beautiful. Beautiful in that they combine storytelling, logic, engineering, associative reasoning and storytelling (yes, I meant to write that twice…) to engage the player and commit the Wren-and-Player team more and more to solve the mystery together.
Two puzzles are extraordinarily good. They are also great examples of the breadth of reasoning the player is asked to do . One is a completely down-to-earth physics question (). The other is an excercise in associative programming (.
During Wren’s investigation, he will meet several people on his way, both friendly (good for Wren and the player needing clues) and malignant (great for the authors and the reader needing suspense). Although the conversations are ASK/TELL, they do not descend in awkwardness. Sometimes the characters won’t answer, but they are almost always believably occupied with other worries or tasks of their own. And even while they are otherwise engaged, their dismissive answers make sense in context. Nifty programming and great attention to both the detail of the immediate surroundings and the big picture of where Wren has gone before.
The Shadow in the Cathedral is a remarkable feat of intertwined puzzle-engineering, worldbuilding and philosophy.
Of course it is sad to have the story broken off after what should be the first chapter of a series. A word of wisdom to the prospective player: let the clock’s tick-tock take you to the bell, and let your imagination take over from there…
I loved every minute, hour and day of this game.
And a small but hopefully annoying heads-up to the authors: the chapter-titles are misaligned. for example: (Spoiler - click to show)the chapter-title says “The Rooftops of St. Philip” after the chase across the rooftops. By then Wren is already safe with Covalt. This is just an example. Every chapter’s title (except 1 & 2) comes after the story it’s supposedly about. A grating flaw in such a great piece. I would find it hard to believe that you would not return to The Shadow of the Cathedral to put the titles in order. (or is this a reflection of the rebellion against the clock?).
Idolizing Vengeance., June 8, 2021A lonely bedridden father... His son gone down the well to seek demonic assistance in avenging his mother's death...
A statue of Baluthar, their self-erected god of Vengeance.
In a wakeful moment, the father realizes he does not want his son sacrificed in the name of revenge. He must bring him back from the underworld.
Baluthar is a well-written dark-fantasy game. The descent into the caverns under the well, infested with carrion-eating beetles gets under your skin as you explore the rooms. The introduction does a good job of describing the elderly and weakened father. This does not really play a role in the rest of the game though. The son remains a mystery until the very end of the game, and even then the player has to deduce his character from vague clues.
The map is small but very efficient. It serves as an atmospheric backdrop to the few rather easy puzzles.
I really liked the ending, simple as it was.
An hour, maybe two, of light horror cave exploring.
Not-princesses all around!, June 4, 2021It all begins with a rather awkward protagonist to control: a pig (which can alledgedly sniff out wizards...) Since pigs walk on four feet and have no opposable thumbs, a lot of commands are thrown out the window by nature of the PC. And although pigs are known to be very clever animals by those who study them (pigycists?), this particular pig does seem to rise even above normal intelligence levels of other members of the species Sus scrofa. For one thing, it can read...
Seeing that this smart pig is somewhat limited in the handiness department, it must find other ways to further its goals. Cue NPCs. By virtue of an excellent grasp of human psychology, our protagonist-pig can manipulate the other characters into following it around and it nudges them to interact with objects or other characters through very deliberately SNIFFing of pieces of the surroundings. Different characters will act upon this sniffing in different ways, according to their nature.
One of the pig's major ways to solve puzzles is therefore to choose the right NPC to come along and do the hands-on work. Instead of switching between PCs with their special abilities, here our pig-protagonist has to switch between NPC accomplices. The way this is handled in-game is both elegant and hilarious.
The puzzles flow seamlessly from the story and the setting. Some of them are pig-adjusted variations on standard adventure-fare, while others are truly surprising and original.
The writing is fresh and crisp, with a truly great comedic touch. There is lots of physical slapstick comedy, but at least as much of the humour comes from the pig's observations of the humans. Our pig always keeps a certain distance and so can easily see through the notions about identity the NPCs have about themselves.
Through these observations and the development of the story, what started as a laugh-out-loud comedy evolves into a character-driven drama by the finale. The Aesop that becomes clear near the end could have been cliché and heavy-handed, but the lightness and subtlety of the writing lifts it far above a finger-waving moral-of-the-story.
Truly one of the greatest games I have ever played.
Heroic character put to the test..., June 2, 2021On the surface, Magic Realms; Sword of Kasza is a nice but not too memorable oldschool quest. After being framed for the murder of the King's messenger, you escape and learn that the evil Rerex has reawakened. His first plan was to possess the magistrate of your town and let him throw you in jail to get you out of the way, for you have been foretold to be "The Chosen One".
But now you are free! After proving your worth to the king, you are sent on a quest to recover the fabled "Sword of Kasza".
The map is interesting. Five magical realms are accessible from a single convenient hub-junction. Each realm holds part of the Magical Sword or some wisdom to be gained or a foe to be vanquished in order to get closer to Rerex. The realms are self-contained puzzle areas. You do have to bring your backpack with you upon entering each one, but everything needed to advance in the game is in the realm itself. (The reason you need your backpack is to avoid the inventory limit and, more importantly, to have your beef jerky with you, should you get hungry...)
Sword of Kasza is fairly light on puzzles. Most are straight from the old build-your-own-adventure box for beginners. There is a code-breaking puzzle which left me scratching my head even after checking the walkthrough. And there is one truly fun variation on the distract-the-guards theme (although not that original).
There is a great and deceptively simple solution to getting into the king's castle. It relies on the player truly imagining what to do in the PC's place.
Instead of more intricate puzzles, the game relies more on the player finding the appropriate actions to trigger story-events. Sometimes these have a great dynamic effect (talking to the right NPC opens up a whole new set of locations), sometimes they are not so well executed (you have to SIT to advance the story...)
Nearing the endgame, there are some rather nice action-sequences. The text here is timed for dramatic effect, and although it may be too slow for some, I enjoyed this.
So far, a run-of-the-mill oldschool fantasy adventure that would not stand out among the hundreds of others of its kind.
The true strength of Magic Realms; Sword of Kasza lies in its completely new approach to player-immersion. Getting the player to forget she is playing a game was an explicitly stated goal of the Infocom Imps.
Authors have tried different ways to absorb the player in their stories. Some weave a story so breathtaking the player cannot help but be moved by the characters' fate. Some go to extreme lengths in building a detailed fictional world to mentally transport the player there. One step further, they might try to achieve a near-perfect simulation where almost every possible action the player thinks of is accounted for.
Here, the author takes a different path into the player's mind. Since interactive fiction is a textual medium, and players of interactive fiction may on average be considered to be more sensitive to language and writing than mere mortals, author James Malette decided to emulate the hardships of the questing hero in the player's experience through the cunning use of linguistic torture.
The most brutal yet least sophisticated example is the simple misspelling. "Messenger" becomes "messager". "Corridor" becomes "corrdior". These are the blunt-force weapons used to make the player feel the Hero's pain.
Of course, multiples of these can be joined together in a single sentence to act as a textual cluster-bomb. Consider this example:
> "This area has a fense inclosing a large field where horses are glazing."
A well-chosen rearrangement of letters in a single word can give new meaning, baffling the reader:
> "The village of Moon has been destoryed by the hand of Rerex!"
Far beyond mere destruction, we are facing a villain who can wipe a village from the story with a handwave!
More subtle than these are the slowly grating "mistakes" that get under the player's skin, making shouting at the screen or even throwing the computer against the nearest wall a real possibility.
> "You're" is "your". Every single time.
> Plural nouns become "noun's". Almost every time.
> The English past tense is written by gluing "-ed" to the verb. Just enough so it catches you by surprise every time.
The foulest weapon of all in this linguistic arsenal though is the dreaded "Seemingly Random Semicolon". It can show up in an innocent list of objects where, although painful, it is at least obviously out of place. It also rears its head in the middle of a descriptive paragraph, forcing the player to doubt her interpretation and reread the offensive sentence over and over, each time with a different emphasis. A truly haunting experience.
> "Beware the traps within, for amany bold knight entered; none never returned."
With this masterpiece I leave you to ponder the power of text, and text alone, to inflict harm upon the player comparable to the harm we put our protagonists through when exploring interactive fictional worlds.
Duke Alaric dukes it out with the trolls., May 20, 2021It had been a long time since I ventured into Hecate, the land of Alaric Blackmoon. I was immediately drawn back in. I love the high-on-questing/low-on-magic surroundings. Alaric is a down-to-earth veteran who got appointed Duke for saving Hecate in the first game, Axe of Kolt. Since then he has been roaming the lands to help his people where he can.
In The Lost Children the children of Hecate are being kidnapped by the trolls, who are normally friendly commercial partners. Might there be some magical coercion behind their changed behavior?
The story of The Lost Children is standard but great fun. Alaric goes on a straightforward, unironic quest to save the missing children, solving problems and puzzles on his way. The first area, west of the Fireheart Mountains, involves two fetch-quests. One is particularly weird/hilarious. The mother of one of the missing children has information Alaric needs, but she demands that he fix her leaking roof first. The fact that she's an Elf who knows through a psychic connection that her son is alive and well might help explain her warped priorities, but still...
The puzzles here range from the very simple find-object-use-object kind to more elaborate obstacles where our hero must obtain the right information first and go through a multi-step plan to get what he needs.
It is during one of these fetch-quests that the player encounters a magnificent puzzle where they have to take stock of their inventory, the geography of multiple locations and make a mental leap that would come natural for a playing child. The moment it clicks is fantastic. ((Spoiler - click to show)Skipping into the cave across the cove.
The area east of the mountains offers a whole other set of obstacles. Here Alaric comes face to face with the trolls and must find ways to deceive, kill or in some other way go around them. There is certainly some learn-by-dying involved in the endgame, where the player has to figure out which steps to take and then restore and execute those steps in as few moves as possible, or else be caught by trolls or pulverized by wizard-fire. In a game as proudly oldschool as this one, I had not one bit of a problem with that.
The problems with <iThe Lost Children mostly lie in a lack of gatekeeping between the two areas. It is exceedingly easy to move through the tunnels under the Fireheart Mountains to the valley of the trolls from which there is no return, and only then notice that you lack a necessary object to kill the ogre.
Indeed, there are many, many ways to get the game into walking-dead terrain. Too many. That's a shame, because the good oldschool features (I learned to like a well-thought-through try-die-repeat puzzle) of the game threaten to be buried under the frustration that comes with too many restores and lack of clues and guidance.
I enjoyed playing through this game with a massive amount of hints and explicit help. Without that, I would recommend playing another Alaric Blackmoon-game like Die Feuerfaust instead.
Funny Demonic Nunnery., April 21, 2021The nuns of the nigh impenetrable Nunnery of Blood have taken your mother. Against all odds and the other demons' advice, you will infiltrate it and free your mother.
First off: a bit of tech stuff.
The adjustable interface is pretty nifty. You can toggle all of the player conveniences. Old-fashioned purist that I am, I chose to turn off the side panes (which show exits, inventory and interactive objects in the room), the auto-map (which is cool, by the way) and the keyword links (I find the blue highlighting distracting and hey, I'm playing a parser game!)
The room description-layout is very basic: first a dry list of exits, objects and characters, followed by the actual room description. Any special action taken is listed even before the exits-and-objects list, but the circumstances and consequences of that action are only described after the room. This basic (default Quest?) layout cuts up the flow of the narrative into discrete chunks.
The writing itself is very good though. It captures the locations efficiently (a dank cellar, a smelly cottage,...). The NPCs are very nicely characterized. As they are mostly means to be used for solving puzzles, the attention mostly goes to their relevant physical features, but there's always a hint at their deeper personalities.
Overall, a playful and mischievous tone pervades the game.
Basilica de Sangre takes place on a small, condensed map, making the most of the limited number of locations and avoiding to send the player on long unnecessary walks.
The puzzles hinge on an original main mechanism. The author has struck a good balance between using this mechanism and incorporating some more traditional text-adventure puzzles to support it.
I mustn't elaborate too much. Suffice it to say that it's always a good idea to take note of where the NPCs are, what they are carrying and to read the (short) conversations attentively.
A very pleasant little game!
Cave crawling Ambassador, April 18, 2021After three weeks as a guest of the Northland Empire, you've had it with these carefully guided official visits and tours designed to show you absolutely nothing of what is really going on in the land. Fortunately, due to a small mishap during an elephant tour, which you had nothing to do with of course, you get an opportunity to search around your lodgings and sniff out the secrets they do not want you to know.
And soon you find the entrance to a cave...
The Meteor, The Stone and a Long Glass of Sherbet sets itself firmly in Zorkian territory. It's a classic and very well done cave-crawl with some explicit references to the caves of Zork.
As soon as you enter the cave halls, you are welcomed by an overwhelming view. Truly one of the most surprising cave-descriptions I have read so far. From here, you explore a small but exquisitely crafted map. There are many differences in level, and you have to be very resourceful to get up or down from one to the other. I prefer this over a 100-room NESW sprawler any day.
The puzzles are clever without being too hard.
A few depend on unusual object-manipulation, many need you to learn a simple magic system with spells that just happen to be tailor-made for the problems you encounter.
I had the strong impression that the author did have a particular order of traversal in mind. If you should skip one of the early locations, choosing to explore deeper first, the puzzles become a lot harder to understand.
The intro and the first part of the midgame are very relaxed, getting the player to trust the game that they can explore and experiment at their leisure. And then Zarfian cruelty strikes. I won't elaborate, but just watch you inventory, okay?
There's a nice shift in pace in the endgame, where you need to make your escape by making a mental *click* to know how to behave under the new circumstances.
A cool game that leans on the cave-crawling tropes and uses them in fun and surprising ways.
(Dis-) Illusions, April 13, 2021This game was a lot better when I played it ten years ago. Or is it I who have come to expect better?
Wearing the Claw is a very traditional fantasy adventure. It's played completely straight. No tongue in cheek, no subtle (or blatant) irony.
I really like traditional fantasy played straight. A lot.
After "The Testing", you are chosen as the worthy young man to find the Pendant of MacGuffin, ahem, Elinor, to lift the curse beset upon your village by an evil wizard. You are to gain entry to the Fortress where it is held and bring it back. No objections from me here. More than half the fantasy stories and games I know start off like this.
But then the game falls short on many points.
Apart from a longish text dump-introduction and a similarly long epilogue, the actual story is hurried. There's not enough attention to tempo to let the player sink into the story or the character. Everything seems to happen one thing after another at the same just-a-bit-too-fast pace.
The view of the magical island across the sea raised expectations that weren't fulfilled. After a literally linear path (one east-west dusty road) I had hoped for the map to open up and become more complex upon entering the fortress. Instead I found one north-south path.
The first puzzle sets a good theme. It's about deception, and one hopes that this will be explored more fully in the rest of the game. The other puzzles do indeed repeat the theme, but they do not widen it. They're similar variations on the theme without becoming more difficult or complicated. As such, they also do not become more rewarding, rather the opposite.
The story itself has the same problem. If only it had broadened in scope to weigh some of the personal or moral implications of deception... Perhaps by adding alternative ways to overcome the obstacles...
Maybe your character could also have become a more three-dimensional person then.
But these are "if"s and "maybe"s that cannot be changed.
The game as it is still has its good qualities. It's competently written. It has a ton of optional responses to unnecessary actions. You can greatly add to the fun in this game by trying many things that are outside of the main quest.
There is a magical gadget that changes the way you view the world, so there's some fun in re-exploring there.
All in all, this is a fine, uncomplicated adventure. It's just that it seems to promise so much more...
Iterations of a snowy day., April 10, 2021Wintervale starts off as a run-of-the mill story about a fantasy town. This introduction was nicely done, with a history of how the town got its name and a list of the different fantasy races living together in Wintervale, listing their strengths. Apparently, the town is special for having all these races living together, as they are mistrusting towards each other in the neighbouring lands. Unfortunately, this information is of no consequence to the rest of the story.
The innkeeper of the town goes down to his drinking hall to investigate after he was rudely awakened by riotous noises in the streets. During this first investigation he is killed, only to re-awaken on the same day.
From here, the circumstances of the innkeeper's investigations turn darker and more confusing. Through multiple re-awakenings, the player must guide him on a search for what exactly is happening.
The game is written with a lot of enthousiasm, and I felt this pull me along while playing. I was gripped by the mystery of the broken glass in the tavern and the riot outside.
I must add however that the sense of mystery was helped (?) along by the unclear writing. The game is riddled with awkward turns of phrase that present your surroundings as more obscure than the author probably intended.
There are also many misspellings ("environment" is consistently spelled "enviornment" for example). The game definitely needs another round of proofreading by players fluent in English.
I liked Wintervale a lot, but perhaps more for the promise it shows than for the story it is in this iteration...
Ten Pearly Isles, March 21, 2021The Lost Islands of Alabaz is a fun and energetic travel-adventure. It's aimed at children and has the feel of the "boy's adventures"-books I used to eat up by the dozens as a child. (For all I knew then, girls had books about knitting and princes. Except for my cool girlfriends, who also read the boy's books... Sign of the times...?)
At the beginning of the story, you get to choose a name for your protagonist, which was a great draw-in for my son. We decided on his own name. After that, he let me do all the hard work and asked about status-reports on his quest each evening.
There is a detailed tutorial in the game in the form of Trig, your best friend NPC. He breaks the fourth wall to tell the player directly what to TYPE. Children playing their first IF might not notice, but for a veteran with several dozen games under my belt, having read numerous threads and essays about Player-PC-Narrator-Parser-relations this made me feel unbalanced at first. I concluded that the aforementioned essays were taking things much too seriously...)
One morning, you, a young knight, are called by the king to go on a quest. The ten islands of the kingdom have been separated by a cursed mist for dozens of years now and there is no sign that it will lift of its own accord. The people are suffering under the lack of trade, food and communication with friends and relatives.
The king gives you one magic pearl to guide you through the mist to one island. From there, you're on your own. Find the cause of the curse and lift it, and find your way back home.
Not the most innovative of premises, but an engaging one. I did feel an obligation to fulfill this quest for the good of all the island-dwellers of Alabaz. (And to my son...)
The premise of the ten islands makes for a great sense of space. You're a seafaring adventurer exploring the unknown!
The islands themselves all have small maps (five locations or less, except for the mazy one...) At first, I thought the author was using a Gateway-like technique, each island a self-contained puzzle-space in the bigger whole. The first islands of The Lost Islands of Alabaz are like this. The more islands you have encountered and explored though, the more it becomes necessary to revisit previous islands, making for a web of relations between the islands that has to be kept in mind.
The puzzles themselves are easy to medium difficulty.Most of them are simple fetch-quests and/or straightforward use-appropriate-object-here obstacles. To get them right however, the player needs to pay close attention to the information he's given in conversations and in the out-of-game Almanac.
That's right! With your download, you get an Almanac about the islands and how they were before the mist. It's a nice 15-minute read, almost like an historical tourist-brochure. Embedded of course are many clues on how to solve the problems in the game.
Actually, the Almanac is just one of three hint-systems for the game. You also carry a journal, in which your progress is recorded along with reminders of puzzles you have yet to solve. And there is Trig. You can ask Trig about all the puzzles, repeatedly. He will start with giving you a nudge toward the first step of the solution, and give more explicit guidance after that.
There are a whole bunch of NPCs to whom you can talk. I found them to be well-characterized with a few strokes of the pen. They talk about many things, and to avoid confusion the author puts suggested topics that pertain directly to the puzzles between parentheses. All conversations use the syntax TALK ABOUT, although you can use ASK ABOUT too. I didn't find any differences.
The Lost Islands of Alabaz plays very smoothly. There are many synonyms for nouns and verbs. The descriptions change in tune with the actions you perform on other islands, there are nice responses to "failed" attempts. The player can feel at ease that the game will not misbehave.
This game turned out to be a lot longer than I expected from the first play-session where I breezed through the first two islands. I spent a few evenings on this quest for the hidden magic pearls. Very enjoyable evenings.
Light adventurous fun. Go play.
Oh, as an extra incentive: You can compete in the Zeppelipede-racing Derby on the Island of RazzMaTazz! Yes, you can. In fact, you must!
Our favourite generic hero saves cultural heritage!, March 18, 2021When I entered the first room in The Adventurers' Museum, I almost breathed a sigh of relief. It was a breath of fresh air to learn that the quest at hand was to retrieve all the exhibits that were stolen from the museum by a thievish imp. Through the actions of my anonymous adventurer, I was going to help restore the historical artefacts of the Necromancer-wars to their rightful place, for the good of future generations of schoolchildren and curious adults. My sociopathic and cleptomaniac tendencies would serve a greater cause.
I'm only half joking here. Although the gameplay of The Adventurers' Museum is the same as any old puzzle-&-looting romp, the task given to me by the old and wize curator of the museum had more importance, more weight than just treasure-taking to kill the Big Bad Bully at the end.
In his review for Baf's Guide, David Welbourn says: "Want to play Zork I again for the nostalgia value, but you've already played that one so many times that it's no longer a challenge? Try The Adventurers' Museum."
I haven't played Zork yet, but I have read enough to know that if you are eaten by a Growl in the dark and if your treasure gets randomly stolen by a thieving imp, I might as well view this game as a rehearsal for when I do tackle Zork.
The technical side of this adventure is more than adequate. There are many synonyms for verbs and nouns. Trying "wrong" things usually gives a response either why you can't do that or just lets you do them and see the funny consequences of your actions (plus it moves the game into unwinnable territory, but hey, save/restore right?)
There are several really oldschool features to this game, but it's as if the author put them in out of respect for past tradition rather than to make gameplay harder.
There's a limited lantern, but there's also an unlimited light source lying right on your path. Your hero gets thirsty, but a river runs right through the cave. You feel hungry, but the curator gave you elvish waybread on your third turn into the game. The imp keeps stealing your stuff, but you can get him off your scent quite easily.
The only thing left that can be annoying to (modern) players is the inventory-juggling, but all that does is make you take a trip back to the museum now and then.
It's probably best to put any frustrations aside and do a few exploratory runthroughs of the cave without worrying about unwinnability or the order of puzzles, just until you get a feel for the place.
Coming back to the Zork-comparison: I have also read enough that I think The Adventurers' Museum really has a special mood of its own. There is a very consistent, almost friendly fairytale-fantasy atmosphere throughout the entire game (except that one room...).
I found the layout and the feel of the map to be brilliant. The cramped cave-crawling of the cave entrance soon gives way to grand vistas of splendid underground halls, a fluorescent flower garden and subterranean pools. A nice big part of the map is accessible from the start, and already in this part the gamespace is layered in three dimensions, with sidepaths leading up and over other areas. Sometimes you get treated to an eagle-eye view of a lower area.
Puzzlewise, there is a wide variety. There's attentive exploring and spelunking, some references to pop-culture, clever time/turn counting,... And yes, sometimes violence is the answer.
Some solutions do require a completely (to me) unmotivated action, and at least one object has a use that was completely unhinted. A bit of let's-try-every-verb and see what happens. That was less fun...
The pacing of the game can be a bit tedious at first. Once you have explored the accessible map though, a nice interaction between puzzles solved, museum-objects in your inventory and bottlenecks opening sets a cascade in motion where you find tunnel after cavern after hall with treasure in rapid succession. Very rewarding.
Conversations are not implemented at all, so you only get to know the few NPCs by their actions and what they choose to say to you. I did find the old curator endearing. (And a bit intimidating. How can he get from his office to the top of the museum stairs to block your way so fast!?)
The Adventurers' Museum may not be innovative or especially creative, but I had a great time playing it.
Fluffy adventure., March 12, 2021A Bear's Night Out is a delightful little adventure!
After dark, while your owner is asleep, you climb (or rather bounce) out of bed. You have to make sure everything is ready for the big day tomorrow, and knowing your owner, he'll have forgotten a bunch of stuff.
The map is very small, eleven rooms in total. While exploring these rooms, there are tons of fun stuff to discover and experiment with.(Pssst, the cat is a great playmate...)
Once you have seen all the rooms, experimented to your hearts content with all the funny stuff and start dealing with the puzzles in earnest, you'll see that not everything in this game is fluffy and soft and easygoing. None of the puzzles are fiendish, but they all require thorough examining of the game-space, a good deal of planning and some real-life puzzlesolving strategies. Of course, all of this is made both harder and more fun by the fact that you're about a foot tall...
A warm and fuzzy adventure.
"Stop the presses! Hold everything!", March 11, 2021[A short bespectacled man runs into the printing press hall. He's frantically waving a crumpled piece of yellowish paper above his head, the static electricity making his hair stand on end.]
-"Where's the boss? Where is the one responsible for reviews? Or better, where is the one who writes all those "Top 100"-lists and those "Best 50"-articles and the Recommended-pages? I need to talk to the one in charge!"
[The boy at the huge black press-machine, his hand still on the big red STOP-button, lifts his cap and scratches his head.]
-"Well sir, I don't know of any boss of the top-lists. I doubt there is such a person. It's all rather more the work of the IF-community as a whole."
-"Now, now, youngun! No need for such foul language! So, I.F. Community, eh? Never heard of him. Or her, for that matter. Strange name, if you ask me.
I suspect Mr. or Mrs. Community is not here? Of course not. Well, you'll have to do. Get your leadtype out, boy, I'll dictate the article. And you make sure this gets on the front page of this Text-Game-gazette or whatever it is you're running here!"
[The boy opens his mouth, trying to clear up the misunderstanding, but the bespectacled man already charges ahead, reading loudly from his crumpled paper.]
T-Zero; A text-adventure for the ages!
A young man wakes up in the dry leaves of the forest floor. Former Librarian and Custodian of the Museum, Count Zero has dismissed him of his duties. He had been snooping around in the vicinity of the restricted areas a little too much lately.
Our protagonist is certain he is on to something however, and he will not give up before he has got to the bottom of it. That his curiosity will lead him through the boundaries of time, he did not expect. Still, courageously he presses onward, determined to set things right.
--"They tirelessly twirl in a circular swirl."--
The writing in T-Zero is exquisite. Poetic, evocative, engaging, the descriptions of locations and actions give the game a rhythm that takes the player from the real and concrete to the dream-like and back without breaking the continuity of the story.
Good writing is indeed of the utmost importance to do justice to this quite intricate story. After the initial exploration of the Museum and its surroundings in the Present, the protagonist gains the means and the knowledge to travel to Past and Future to tweak the outcome of events just so to gain victory over Count Zero's plan to enslave humanity. This involves fiddling with the state of the Past to gain access to puzzle solutions in the Present, which in turn set up the Future for your chance of besting Count Zero, the Time Smith.
To keep up the flow of this excellent writing, the author has opted to leave the exits out of the room description. Instead there is an EXITS-command that will drily list available directions. This command does not take a turn, and I did not mind reflexively typing it as I was mapping the game-area.
The map plays a huge part in the enjoyment of the atmosphere of this game. It is big and readily accessible, except for some well-planned bottlenecks with puzzle-locks to help with the story's pacing and to prevent the story from becoming incomprehensibly befuddling.
Many locations will seem inert at first, having no apparent interactive content or even purpose apart form being an expendable room. Most of these will come into play in the other ages you will visit, becoming an influence that moves through time.
It is a joy to re-explore the map in each era, comparing the different times. The locations and their relations will be subtly different each time, giving a fresh and surprising look at known ground.
While the story and writing of T-Zero are mindboggling in the best sense of the word, some of the puzzles are the opposite.
First: many of the puzzles are standard adventure-fare. They can be obvious or more original, but they stay within the comfortable zone of puzzle-design: the commands necessary to influence the game, the mental picture of possibilities and options to tackle an obstacle.
But then there are the perplexing puzzles. Not because they are difficult in a normal adventuring context, but because they draw on a set of knowledge and inspiration that most IF-players will not access in this context. Some of these puzzles are of the satisfying think-outside-the-box variety. bringing great joy to the player. All of them depend on the player's knowledge of a very English language and popular culture. Joyful as they may be to the player who is in-the-know, in general these are just plain unfair.
Many, if not all, default responses are personalized, most times in a beautifully literate one-sentence gem. In case of an ambiguity between nouns in a command, the game lists all the options in a menu, allowing you to choose the one you meant. Practical, but also evidence of how user-friendly the game desires to be, despite the mindblowing puzzles.
Also very practical are the location-specific hints. They helped me on many occassions with a gentle nudge. On the other hand, there were times when the hints just confirmed I had the right idea, but I still needed a walkthrough to find the proper syntax.
As is to be expected; time plays a very big role in T-Zero. It pervades the entire game. Since time is elapsing and day is followed by night, you can expect some solutions to puzzles also being time-dependent. While most of the time this adds to the anticipation, it can also mean a boring few minutes typing WAIT over and over if you were a few moves late to a specific location and you have to wait an entire day without anything else to do. (This happened to me once, but it was all a result of my own bad timing/planning.)
Tricky: you have to revisit some rooms after your first exploration. Some objects just pop up after a while without there being a reason or an obvious notification from the game about this.
Lastly, I would like to point your attention to the rag man. While he doesn't have much to say, he is a pretty nifty NPC. Without wanting to give too much away, this character teeters constantly on the edge of the game-world and our own. I spent a lot of time musing about the kind of reality he goes to after I type QUIT.
T-Zero is a mindbogglingly good game. Best enjoyed with a walkthrough on the side.
[The short bespectacled man crumples the now sweaty paper in his hands into a ball and throws it in the nearest bin.]
-"You got all that, boy? Make sure it's on this issue's front page, you hear me!? Or else..."
[Before the boy can say anything more, the man leaves the printing hall, contentedly rubbing his hands together. He even hops a little out of joy over a job well done.]
Unmagical Wizardry, March 3, 2021After your worldview has been shaken when the Wizard Dumbledore appeared in your flat and offered you a job, you wake up the next day with a hangover and a signed contract to teach "Muggle Studies" at Hogwarts Academy. When you arrive there, the halls and corridors are abandoned because of a spell gone wrong. You must set things straight without resort to magic.
Muggle Studies is set in Hogwarts Academy, that grand fantasy-medieval castle in a hidden part of England. You start off in Dumbledore's office and must make your way down a tower and back up again after gathering what you need.
Although a tower with its limited room for branching hallways and side-rooms makes for a good setting for a straightforward text-adventure, it is also very narrow and linear. The gamespace feels cramped because of this. It is easy to forget that you are supposedly in this great building with all sorts of corridors , halls and other towers, let alone that it stands in a wide landscape with dark forests. A few windows with lush descriptions of the shingled roofs and the towering walls outside the tower would have pulled the space more open. Maybe even a view of Hagrid's cabin or the living tree in the distance to remind players of the universe they're in. The one window I could look through gave a very generic description of green woods and a glimpse of water outside.
The puzzles in Muggle Studies are good, but nothing too imaginative. This is beginner-level IF, where exploring and TAKE x WITH y suffices for the most part. The puzzles are very well hinted, without too much handholding. The game has one room where you have to figure out the answer to four riddles, a puzzle device rarely seen in modern IF, but which fit very well in this setting. A puzzle that does not work so well is a coded magic book (Spoiler - click to show)where the cipher is a simple ROT13. I decided to decode it manually to get some sense of achievement out of it, but I would have preferred if the author had invented a simple code him/herself (? I can't tell from the name.) and put a deciphering book somewhere hidden in the tower.
There are a good number of books and notes around that give clues and entertainment. I especially liked the Book of Herbs, where you can LOOK UP a large number of magical plants from the index, most of which are of no importance to the game.
Another nice touch like this is the file of misbehaviors and punishments in Mr. Filch's room, where you can read about some of the misschievous plans of Hogwarts students.
The game handles conversations through TALK TO menus, which fits perfectly with the difficulty. There are always some fun options to talk about next to the important topics.
In keeping with the beginner difficulty level, there is a tutorial voice that gives advice on proper syntax for commands. Unfortunately, it sounds very pedantic to anyone who has played IF before.
The best part of the game to me is the slowly unfolding backstory involving your grandmother and your ex-girlfriend. It gives an emotional dimension to your character in this otherwise standard gathering-magical-objects quest.
A nice diversion for a few hours.
"It was lucky that you had the statuette.", February 26, 2021...says the narrator voice in The Darkest Road at a certain point. Lucky indeed, given that there was no clue whatsoever that I would find anything, let alone a magic statuette, in the place the walkthrough eventually told me to look!
What would one do if one were a simple farmhand in a fantasy setting and one saw a prophecy coming over the horizon? Run like hell, of course, because prophecies tend to lead to gruesome death and other inconveniences in these circumstances...
But not you. You have elvenblood trickling somewhere in your bloodline, so you heed the call. You take in the old prophecy-bearing wizard who stumbled into your care, nurse him back to health and let him teach you of the "Silent Song", a rare magic talent that lurks in you because of said elvenblood.
So off you go on an oldschool quest to vanquish the Dark Lord.
The Darkest Road has very good atmosphere. On your quest, you move from your familiar homestead to the wide grasslands, then through the dark forest, then sharp and windy mountainpeaks until finally you arrive in Evil's Lair. With each new area you explore, the surroundings feel more hostile and oppressive. Here and there is a resting point, a beautiful location that breaks the gloom and dread for a moment.
The descriptions are very good. Even though you encounter standard dark fantasy stuff, there are many details that lighten up the clichés.
Unfortunately, the gameplay is not so good. There are many non-interactive locations. Well-described as they may be, they don't offer enough reward to the player for the effort she has made to reach them.
And quite an effort it is! The game is full of unintuitive and underclued puzzles.
Many solutions are dependent on whether you are carrying or wearing a sparsely described and unhinted object, not on the player figuring out what she could do with said object.
When you do have to manipulate objects, often you get into try-everything-on-everything-else territory, like in a bad point'n'click escape game.
Also, there are quite a few one-use-only commands that only work in one situation. Try the same verb in any other situation and you get a default dismissive response. Not strong motivation to keep trying.
Add to the list that obvious synonyms or alternative verbs are not implemented (I could MOVE but not PUSH some heavy object), and I believe I am to be forgiven for playing this one largely by walkthrough. I gave it a fair chance, really I did.
To end on a more positive note, the unforeseeable sudden gruesome deaths are quite amusing, as the narrator offers to resurrect you. Which translates as "Would you like to restart?"
Suicide by vitamin C, February 7, 2021Wow! This game sure doesn't beat around the bush. You, as Sir Ramic Hobbs, an out-of-shape and severely hung-over knight, are dropped in a bear cave. An agreement which you do not remember signing says you swear to save the damsel from the High Level Gorilla. Now on your way, start adventuring!
Sir Ramic Hobbs and the High Level Gorilla is a text-adventure from the old ages. Within the first few turns, a ton of anachronisms and wildly differing rooms have flown by. Each on its own, these are pretty funny. As a whole however ... uhm, they don't make a whole.
The gameworld is totally off its rockers. The locations and the mood are wildly inconsistent. The only thing holding this game together is whatever the author's impulses thought was funny at the time. This incoherent setting and atmosphere may get a few laughs, but it sure is not engaging or immersive.
Fortunately, this setting is home to some good puzzles. Apart from getting the right objects to use in the right spot, you also have to watch out that you move from room to room at the right time. If not, some invincible adversary will stop you from progressing further or just kill you on the spot. There are lots of opportunities to forget an object or an action in a room that you cannot get back to later. This means that the metacommands SAVE, RESTORE and UNDO are completely legitimate adventuring commands. Go explore the neighboring rooms and restore when you are confident that you have the lay of the land memorized.
There are two in-game help-resources: an overly humble "Bloodcurdling Owl", whose responses are so selfdeprecating they sound insulting to you, and the disembodied voice of Wizard Prang, your narrator (who doesn't seem to think very highly of your knightly skills... Up to you to decide whether to trust the advice this odd pair gives.
The absolute zaniness of this game amused me enough to keep looking just a bit further, and I'm glad I did. About three quarters into the game I encountered a Great Puzzle. The kind of puzzle that would be so obvious in real life, but that somehow manages to keep evading your wits in an adventure game. When I finally found the solution, I smiled. Nay, I grinned. Ear to ear. You know what I mean...
The High Level Gorilla is an uneven mix of dumb jokes, funny juxtapositions and non-sequiturs, frustrating deaths and at least one glorious puzzle moment.
Worth playing.
In other news: Demons have overrun the Vatican., February 5, 2021But first:
Completely out of the blue, your D&D-game has cracked through the ceiling of your living room and spat out Tark, a confused sorceress. It has also incinerated your roleplaying band of friends and kidnapped your girlfriend.
The Battle of Philip Against the Forces of Creation is easily the most super-awesomest title for an adventure game I have ever heard. I wish I could write here that the game itself is as awesome...
Don't get me wrong, it's a fun game, but it does not live up to the radical-mayhem-supercoolness of its title.
After the intrusion of the D&D-world upon our own, you have to go on a castle-crawl to free Cindy. The puzzles are standard adventuring fare. Find a key, use a spell, get rid of a murderous demon-queen, stuff like that...
However, you have to die several times to know where the puzzles actually are, and a few times more to get the solution. That's obviously a part of the game. The death scenes are quite amusing.
The writing overall is quite good. The dark fantasy atmosphere when you finally get out of your house (past a Fire Elemental in the garage) is great. Once in the castle, the grim and oppressive feeling goes up a notch or two. In here, some descriptions, while well written, are downright horrifying and obscene. (So over the top to my tastes that it became laughable. But maybe not to all players. Be warned.)
Unfortunately, the scenery in those descriptions is disappointingly underimplemented. You are limited to examining and manipulating the objects in the list below the room description, everything else is met by a default "You can't do that"-response.
The castle is big and diverse. Many rooms are lusciously/revoltingly described. There are also bottlenecks in predictable but enticing places (getting in the cellar, climbing to the top of the tower,...), which makes for good pacing.
From background info on the Internet Archive and from an in-game object (the "Reference Book for People who are not Philip") I gather that this was a joke/gift game to Philip Kegelmeyer, the author of Tark Simmons, Priestess of the First Church. Because of this, there are a number of inside jokes and references that any other player will not get (hence the reference book). Nonetheless, the game is often funny and the grim & gore is well done (if you can stomach stuff like that).
Good game for a few hours of fun/gore.
"Once more into the breach, dear friend?", January 17, 2021That is the tempting question the game asks you after you've typed QUIT. Many times I responded YES to just try and avoid that last nasty trap one more time.
Avon was originally written in 1982 in Cambridge University as a mainframe game. It was later released by the Topologika company. After reading some background information, I get the impression that the good folks at Topologika have shaved and polished off a lot of the splinters and rough edges of the original.
While it is still possible to die, you only do so when you have actually made a wrong move or choice. There are lots of unhinted traps where you die on entry. In these instances you are asked "Now you probably wish you didn't do that, don't you?", giving you the chance to continue the game from that location. You do lose the opportunity to "solve" the trap and get the points this way.
I put "solve" between quotation marks because there are very few actual puzzles in Avon. There are many unannounced death-traps, a lot of riddles where you get only one chance and you must have found a clue beforehand (no lucky guesses!) and a few easy mazes. A few playthroughs are needed to locate the traps and the clues and passwords, and only then can one hope to put them in the right order and solve the game.
I know that if I were to read a game described as above, I'd probably run away. Fortunately I had almost no information on it when going in. Avon is actually a really fun game. The generous helping of Shakespeare quotes (often in inappropriate contexts) are funny, the parser and narrator are friendly and polite, descriptions are over the top in a good way...
Two more things to persuade you to play: a) at one point you get an ass's head on your neck, and b) this game contains one of the dumbest and funniest puns in any IF I have ever played.
Unfair, sure, but fun!
Boot patrol!, December 17, 2020I have officially finished my first Infocom game!
And I liked it a lot. Wishbringer brought me a lot of moments of joy and laughter. Once you complete the introductory task, it seems the game-world turns dark and sinister. Once the boot patrol turns up though, it turns out to be whimsical and funny. The little town of Festeron (Witchville in the dark) is full of surprises, secret passages and absurd characters. When I found my way to Misty Island I laughed out loud. Phineas and Ferb is one of my favorite cartoons, and here I saw an island full of Agent Ps...
The puzzles are fun and on the easy side. I would recommend that you look at the official feelies and the original game-booklet before playing though. (Widespread on the web.)
Then why only three stars? Because it's possible to make the game unwinnable when you are at the doorstep of victory by not reading a certain note before it becomes forever inaccesible to you. And because the Magick Stone that this game is supposedly about is hidden without clues, like an inside joke from the makers. And because things like that are extra frustrating in an easy-going whimsical adventure such as this one.
But do play it. It's fun.
Wade misses the spot., November 4, 2020The WadeWars III: Askin was published as a DOS game in 1993. The author dug it up in 2000 and transferred it to Inform. Verbatim, as far as I can tell. What a missed opportunity to give it a thorough work-over.
Your weird science minded recluse of an uncle has gone missing so you go and search his appartment. There you find a mysterious machine with a big red button. Now, what do you do when you encounter Big Red Buttons on mysterious machines? Push them, right! I'd probably push the button even in real life... (People have warned me against this though...)
Pushing the button transports you to a mirrored, dungeonlike version of your uncle's apartment. After a few turns, you are transported back to the normal world. When you are standing in a particular room when this switchback happens, you end up in an altogether strange land, where the search for your uncle continues.
Now, the author has set us up in a quite well written (if you can stand the grating sensation of typos) fantasy land with an intriguing and promising puzzle-mechanism: a parallel mirror-map where East and West are switched and altered for a few turns. (Heck, it could make for an interesting maze-puzzle, where you alternate between realities to navigate.) Unfortunately, instead of being the basis for different puzzles, this mechanism is hardly used in the game.
Implementation is very shallow, there are lots of empty locations, the writing is of differing quality (plus typos).
One part of the game does shine: the way to the Cloud Palace where you encounter the Laws. Quite a vivid impression.
Disappointing.
My First Love., November 2, 2020Some fifteen years ago, I came across this strange gameplaying/storytelling -medium. They called it Interactive Fiction. I thought it sounded interesting, but it turned out to be confusing, frustrating. I did not feel welcome in this world.
Then I came across "Worlds Apart". Thank you, Lady Britton, for "Worlds Apart".
For days on end I lost myself in this game, this story. Outer and inner worlds entwine. Exploration demands diving into ocean and mind alike.
Since that experience, I've played a lot of good, even great IF, but...
"Worlds Apart" will always be my first love.
An Ogre, a Chameleon, a Werewolf and a Squirrel fail to walk into the inn..., November 1, 2020Because, strangely, there is no inn in this otherwise standard Fantasy adventure.
I say standard, but it's actually a very good game.
After a lengthy but very funny introductory scene where you, the smith's apprentice, are appointed "volunteer" by the villagers to kill the dragon and get its treasures (the town has a bit of a tax-problem), you find yourself in a traditional Fantasy land. After talking to all the villagers and starting to explore a bit, you remember that aside from funny narrators, hidden treasure and a wizard in his tower, old-school Fantasy adventures also tend to be Big and Difficult.
-Setting: The entire map (minus a handful of hidden locations) is accessible from the get-go. The game thus has a great sense of spaciousness. The boundaries of the playable area are also very naturally worked into the narrative. There are mountain ranges with their peaks stretching out as far as you can see, grassplains too big to cross where you see the next town shimmering against the horizon, the ocean shore where you can just see the barbaric islands through the mist...
There are many, many locations. It helps a lot that they are geographically ordered. From the central village, you can choose to go to the river/swamp region, the forest or the rocky hills. The wizard's tower lies on its own mountain peak.
Some of these locations are truly beautiful: a hidden lake seen from a cliff above, a lone giant tree in the forest, the tower seen from a hill top far away...
The openness of the game world does mean that it can be hard to find that next loose thread while puzzle-solving, meaning that you will see some of the locations so many times that you don't care about that wonderfully described scenery anymore.
-Puzzles: The puzzles in The Windhall Chronicles are a mixed batch.
The three parts of the Wizardry-test are great. They are followed by a logic puzzle that I took out my chess pawns for and had a lot of fun solving. Most puzzle fans will probably have seen it in some form before though. There's a fetch-quest for the wood-elf that I found very enjoyable, and then there's the Mire Cat's riddle.
Then there are some puzzles that make sense,...in hindsight. The kind where you couldn't possibly tell what other function an object might have. Or where the sequence of actions is underclued.
One or two puzzles just make you go "Huh?" after finally checking the walkthrough.
It's a shame that the final puzzle, the dragon-fight, is completely clear and obvious (which I find a good thing for a final puzzle),but not described clearly enough to solve it while staying in the flow and thrill of the endgame.
-NPCs: To solve the puzzles, there are many characters that will help you. That is, if you help them first of course... This leads to some interesting fetch-quests and some funny conversations. It also adds to the feel of the game that all the characters have different opinions of one another, giving you a glimpse of the town's social dynamics.
Very important here is that all the characters (you/the protagonist included) have sleep cycles. Wildly differing sleep cycles... Your dwarven master gets up at 5:30 while the lazy alchemist doesn't wake up before 10:30 am. Some crucial information has to be got from an insomniac knight who doesn't show himself until after dark... Sometimes you can be forced to WAIT twenty turns because the character you have business with is still asleep. (Knocking on their door doesn't help...)
On the other hand, it is very rewarding to plan out your actions so that you can solve a puzzle and give the result to a character just as they get up. Therefore, I strongly recommend copying the sleep times from the walkthrough. They are all listed at the top of the page.
-Writing: The writing is good, sometimes very good. I only found a handful of typos, which is not a lot in a game this size. Some location descriptions are simply beautiful, but the prose does turn a bit purple after you solve some key puzzles. Also, both the intro and the epilogue are very wordy. Well written, but wordy.
The writing is also truly funny at times. Can't say much without giving the away the jokes but: (Spoiler - click to show)the shed falling apart when you turn the long-sought-after key...
So:
-The sense of space, Fantasy feel, natural borders and wonderful surroundings make this gameworld a joy to explore.
-The lack of pacing/bottlenecks, the sleep cycles and the undercluedness of some puzzles can lead to pointless wandering.
All in all, I was absorbed in this game for a week, often pondering puzzles in bed and coming up with new things to try.
Strongly recommended.
(If you enjoy this kind of text adventure, be sure to check out Larry Horsfield's Alaric Blackmoon-series)
Snippets of a mage's life, October 17, 2020I played The Dreamhold in tutorial-mode. The tutorial voice was really well done, providing not only a basic introduction to IF but also guidance to certain puzzles and avenues of possibilities deep into the game proper. It never gets too intrusive.
There is an immense castle/dungeon to explore, with quite a complex layout. I like making my own maps, so this was a fun excercise on its own. You start off in a recognizable, habitable few rooms, and the further you venture from that center, the more varied and fantastic the locations get. There are a few vantage points up above. The wide sunlit vistas from these are a nice contrast to the dark feeling in the rest of the castle.
The puzzles in tutorial-mode are well-clued and solvable without hints, provided that you are well and truly engaged in solving this game. Especially near the end it is neccesary to understand what you have learned during your journey, instead of just having gone through the motions.
The sunlit vistas I mentioned are welcome sources of light and space in this game. I would have welcomed just a sprinkling of comic relief or self-deprecating humor from the PC to break the sad-and-gloom atmosphere a bit more. After some time searching the halls and domes the air in the castle starts weighing on the player's mind.
The implementation goes very deep, for scenery-objects as well as for "wrong" commands. Most things the player tries are recognized and their impossibility or impracticality explained, instead of getting a standard sarcastic snarl.
Fun, big, entertaining. Three stars for now, maybe more when I replay in expert-mode.
(mostly) Logical Magic, October 11, 2020I had been putting of playing Savoir Faire because it is a) an old school puzzle hunt which b) depends on magic. Two things I do not particularly enjoy when playing IF.
However, after succesfully completing the puzzly Theatre with very few hints, I decided to take on Emily Short's challenge. It was great!
The reason I dislike most magic is that it feels superficial. A bunch of floaty blabla about "words of power" that somehow control the essence of things doesn't appeal to me.
In Savoir Faire, most of the puzzles depend on the Lavori d'Aracne, a magic system that lets the practitioner LINK objects. That way there is at least a hint of a physical connection between the objects and the practitioner of magic. These links also depend on a material likeness of the objects, so the magic system feels more like the use of an extra property of nature than a violation of it.
At the start of the game, your PC is almost too obnoxious to even be an anti-hero. Coming to the house you grew up in to ask for money to help with gambling debts, finding that your adoptive father and sister are not there while you expected them to be, and then going on to loot the place? Not very nice, to put it mildly. Through the snippets of backstory you find through memory and exploration though, he is somewhat redeemed (somewhat, that is.)
The setting, the mansion of the count who took in the PC, makes quite an impression through the near-perfect prose of Emily Short. Descriptions are terse, only the bare necessities there, with an ever so delicate sprinkling of detail. Examining further however opens up layers of feeling and meaning about the rooms and furniture, so that the player is drawn into this world. Extremely well done!
Because of the use of magic, I tagged this game "fantasy", but it's actually more an alternate history, where the old France is precisely the same as it was, with the addition of this extra set of natural laws, i.e. the Lavori d'Aracne.
Hard puzzles, but all of them logical; many alternative solutions (except one I found so obvious that I was disappointed not to have it work: (Spoiler - click to show)To uncork a bottle you link the cork to your sword and then draw the sword. To my mind it made much more sense within the magic system to put the sponge in the drain, then link the cork to the sponge and pull out the sponge.)
And even when you're stuck you can relax while playing with the mechanical cooking contraption (which is very reminiscent of the contraptions in Metamorphoses)
Great game!
The dream of a brain in a vat full of liquor., October 8, 2020"The Chinese Room" posed a hard problem to my consciousness: three stars or four?
First off: nits to pick.
-Very annoying typos and misspellings ("er" instead of "her"), the consistent use of quotation marks instead of apostrophes (plover"s eggs).
-Many nouns or synonyms not recognized.
-Shoddy implementation of a cool device (the qualiascope)
-A rather big nit: there is an unmentioned path northwest from the beach.
My consciousness decided on four stars however.
-Although the game has no real story, the diverse puzzles are tightly held together by a very cool and engaging framework, the land of philosophical thought experiments.
-The puzzles are very well thought out, and more often than not very funny.
-Extensive background information, a crash course in the history of philosophy that makes an interested mind look up more on Wikipedia, or, in my case, open up my old copy of Bertrand Russel's "The History of Philosophy."
-The varied locations, landscapes and scenes are very nicely described, painting a picture in the player's head with a few well-chosen sentences.
-Playing illegal logic games with Willard Van Orman Quine (the philosopher with the coolest name ever.)
-An actual intuition pump!
A joy to play.
Points for best NPC: The Castle, April 30, 2020In this retelling of the classic, wellknown fairy-tale, you play Beauty. However, you (the player) are not Beauty. Through memories triggered by various rooms, objects, pieces of furniture, it's clear that she has lived a life of her own, in this castle with its Lord, and outside it in her village.
She does not find Beast after coming home from a visit to her family, so she has to search the entire Castle.
And this is where the game shines. This Castle is so detailed, so well implemented and so vividly described, I felt like I was looking over Beauty's shoulder every step of her search. Your discovery of the different wings and rooms of this Castle is paced to perfection. The various puzzles hold you long enough to get accustomed to a certain part of the setting, until you find the solution and another part opens up. This has the effect that in the end, I felt like I had experienced much more space than is actually in the map.
For other of the many qualities of this game, I direct you to other reviews. The Castle was what I wanted to highlight most.
Rags to Riches... a second time., April 20, 2020 Die Feuerfaust is the third installment in the Alaric Blackmoon-series by Larry Horsfield. Having played and tested the previous two, I knew pretty much what I was in for, and looking forward to it.
I was not disappointed. Unapologetic (have I used this word in an Alaric-review before? I just might have...) oldschool adventuring, big and varied settings, some use of magic, some killing of foes, and at least one very elaborate, well thought out puzzle (Have you ever tried any horseriding? Wait til you try riding a wild Zampf).
Also: some lack in depth of implementation and interactivity in the large and sprawling settings, as is to be expected in the oldschool tradition.
A classic storyline drives the game forward: Whereas Alaric was a run-down mercenary going on a quest that lead him to glory in Axe of Kolt, in this game Alaric is stranded after a shipwreck and has lost all his belongings. He must work his way through various obstacles and tasks toward his final goal, recovering the famed Fist of Fire.
Nothing new, but tried and trusted adventure fare.
Many NPCs, most still smelling of the cardboard they were cut out of, some more fleshed out. All do what they're supposed to do in a text-adventure such as this: drive the action forward with clues and gifts.
Many, many puzzles, most quite straightforward and not too big. And as mentioned, a great Zampftaming sequence to sink your Hero-teeth into.
All in all, the best of the three I have played so far. The evolution begun in Spectre of Castle Coris continues: tighter gameplay, clearer subgoals so less wandering about, more engaging story.
Not must, but certainly should-play.
A new version of the game will be appearing soon.
Classic Fantasy meets Ghost Mystery, March 25, 2020The second Alaric Blackmoon game. It's a large oldschool quest to save a village from a spectre that's killing and abducting people.
Right from the start it got my attention because of the mystery aspect. Who or what is this Spectre? Finding this out is essential to vanquishing it in the end.
I like my fantasy oldschool, straightforward and unapologetic. Here the mystery adds to the fun. Good puzzles, a great sense of space once you enter the castle grounds. Linear, but I don't mind that in this sort of game. Some great, vividly written scenes.
The author made a design choice that may be offputting to some: until you enter the castle, you must send the ghost away with a prayer every 20 turns or so. To me, this added to the presence of the Spectre, to others, this will get dull.
This game's good for a week, maybe two of ghosthunting and castlesearching fun. Well worth playing.
It's only oldschool fantasy but I like it., February 28, 2020 This is cliché fantasy galore and it's great!
Step one: set expectations to sorcerers, dwarves, a magic axe and all that.
Step two: don your Hero-attire and rush in!
Step three: be stopped in your tracks by this or that puzzle that is cleverer than you thought, wander through a forest searching for poultry, witness a demonic sacrifice...
It's good fun and the Hero of the day should count his blessings that you're the one guiding him because there's a few hard and complex puzzles. (Heroes aren't all that bright in the noggin, you know).
It's also fantastically long. This is one to sink your teeth into. Clear an hour a day in your schedule for a month to play this. You might get to the end by then.
AoK does show its age: some non-interactive forest-locations all alike, lots of death, some learn by trial-and-death, timed sequences. I didn't mind any of that because: fun!
In the end, it's a great straightforward fantasy romp that had me tied to the screen for some weeks.
A Should-Play!
Strawmen, trolls and unicorns. Oh My!, December 25, 2019"The Lost Labyrinth of Lazaitch" is a type of game I miss in newer IF. It's an oldschool fantasy text adventure. Period.
No deep metaphors for our pressing modern times, no personal symbolism about overcoming your deepest fear, no soul-searching tale about spiritual enlightenment.
You are Alaric, a Hero. Somewhere to the East is a Magic Book of great importance. Obstacles and enemies are between you and said book. Overcome them and get the Book. Period.
Aaah, good times!
Be sure to bring your brain, because we all know Heroes need all the help they can get in that department, especially with puzzles like in LLL. Not too hard, but enough to get you scratching your head.
This way, they are both funny and engaging, not frustrating. Just remember the 3 IF commandments: Read, Explore, Examine.
Also bring your imagination, because on your way you will see beautiful and horrifying sights. May you be the first to live and tell the world about the troll-bowl or the Red Tower.
Full disclosure: I playtested this game.
Urbanly Fun Fantastic Romp, December 10, 2019(Well, it actually plays out as much around the city as in it, but I have my reasons...)
First things first: It has a cannon! -Hmm?.. Yes, I'll wait...
Now, Risorgimento Represso is a very good puzzler. Because the main puzzles center around the same theme, completing the first (silly) task before you is one big trial run to prepare you for what's to come. It gets you comfortable with the feel and humorous tone of the game. It also teaches you what details to look for and trains you in the specific puzzle-solving mindset you need for the game.
All the puzzles are well thought-out and in-game logical; on top of that, you might pop an eyeball or two laughing while solving them.
Storywise, Risorgimento makes fantastic use of the Wizard's Apprentice-trope. The whole concept gets the player and the PC on a shared learning curve, facing the same obstacles, and scratching their heads at the same times. I found this really heightened my involvement with my character and with the story.
There's a great build-up of tension, from playful exploration and experimentation to seriously hard thinking about how to save your Master. That's a good learning curve ànd a good immersion curve for you!
So, go shoot that cannon, those of you who haven't done so already; and don't smell the paint thinner, it's bad for you.
Very good, but not my cuppa..., December 6, 2019When browsing recommended lists and best of lists, Suveh Nux springs up frequently, so I decided to play it.
I can only agree with other reviewers that this is an excellent puzzle-game. Everything works, there's more than one "Aha!"-moment, and there are almost limitless possibilities to experiment, combine stuff and spells and stand in wonder at the results of the latest whim you acted upon.
I loved the brain excercise of solving the logic/language puzzle. The game is a great cerebral A-implies-B problemsolving excercise, with a very big sandbox.
Personally, I like a bit more involvement, the feeling that there's something bigger at stake, but that's just me.
Fantastically Fun City Romp, November 29, 2019I would have rated this game 6 stars if it would have let me fly the Pterosaur!
There. That should be enough incentive to stop reading this and go play it.
Or not. I absolutely loved this game.Here's why:
-The world. The two cities Illuminismo Iniziato takes place in are big, detailed and deeply implemented. When I began playing, I spent a lengthy and thoroughly enjoyable time just sightseeing, examining stuff, thinking about what I would buy later on and in what shop. I also read the newspaper, and was pleased to see it provided me with hot-off-the-presses news about what happened in the world. And of course, in a city like this, I talked to the people.
-NPC-interactions. The cities are populated with lots of characters, most of whom you might remember from the game's prequel, Risorgimento Represso (also highly recommended). They each have their own personalities, and you can talk to them about quite a bit more than needed for the task at hand.
One NPC who undoubtedly deserves a paragraph to herself is Crystal, your NPC-tag-along slash hint-system. A wonderful character. Helpful but not too helpful when you need a nudge (or a shove). A knowledgeable guide to the game-world when you want background-info. And a tireless chatterbox for your entertainment only.
-Puzzles. Against this background, there are puzzles. Many puzzles. They are mostly well-clued (and if they are not, yaay, another excuse to talk to Crystal!), some are quite difficult, and all are so well integrated that you hardly feel like you're solving a puzzle. Also, some are laugh-so-hard-you-might-break-a-rib funny.
This is a fantastic game.
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