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Well-made story, but I'm not sure how much I got, December 31, 2020The Cursèd Pickle of Shireton is an excellently crafted story. There is great art, music, complex and mostly bug-free mechanics, and fun writing (especially in the "meta" portions). There is a lot of stuff here. However, I feel like I got stuck too much, and at some point didn't really desire to continue and discover the game's secrets.
This is a parody of the MMORPG genre, which is itself implemented in a text-based simulation of an actual MMORPG, presented as a fallback version for a graphical game. There are NPCs and fake PCs. There is a support forum where players discuss the game and share mods. Beneath each scene there is a chat screen showing the players' interactions in the area.
The problem is that the gameplay wasn't really fun for me. I get that it's *supposed* to be unfun, a simulation of a genre that I never really enjoyed, but plenty of genre parodies manage to make the gameplay decent in of itself (or, in IF, limit the mechanical aspects and focus on the story). I did a ton of delivery quests, sending mail from one part of Sameytown to another. The combat was particularly annoying to me. It was tedious to have to click the words in order, and I didn't like that the turns were on a timer (I discovered the slow time mod thanks to the forum thread). I actually felt like I enjoyed the combat in A Final Grind more than this. And there was the haunted house where everything permanently lowered your level??? I stopped playing in the town after crossing the desert because I couldn't get a sense of how to advance. I did enjoy the Crossing the Desert puzzle, though.
Reading some of the other reviews and discussions, I got a better sense of what this game contained, and how much I missed. I never played The Baker of Shireton by the same author, which apparently has a lot of shared content with this story. I think the key is to not approach this as a typical RPG, and just go hog wild.