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A hasty IF saved by some clever humor, November 27, 2010Although this is apparently the third game in a series, it's my introduction to the saga of Alex and Paul, and to the author's work as a whole. Based on what I've seen here, I'll probably be checking out more at some point in the future.
This was written for a Speed IF comp, so room descriptions and implementation tend toward the simplistic. To save time, everything seems to have been nailed down, so you'll be seeing a lot of odd messages like this one:
>take purses
That's fixed in place.
There are also some spelling and punctuation issues, including one in the intro paragraph. The most notable is the dropped apostrophe for things belonging to Paul: "Pauls garden," "Pauls pool," etc. Thankfully, these are not egregious enough to distract from either gameplay or story.
Speaking of story, this title relies heavily on humor. Luckily for us, most of it is genuinely funny. Some of it is meta-humor: for instance, the speakers in the kitchen were playing "Custom Library Messages" by David Fisher when I first entered. There's an object in the same room described as "(unimplemented) cheese," the description of which is "You can't see any such thing. (See? I told you so.)" Unfortunately, other actions result in that ubiquitous fixed-in-place message, spoiling the humor somewhat. There's also plenty of humor related to the world these characters inhabit: aliens have invaded, apparently recently, so everything has been replaced by AlienTech (tm) technology. There are also a group of Dagon cultists who live next door, and a sleeping pirate.
The story does deal with same-sex relationships, which runs the risk of offending people who might be offended by that sort of thing. I was nervous, when I first started, that I was going to be treated to a bunch of jokes along the lines of "gay people are funny lol." Thankfully, Alex and Paul are charming as a couple, if a little sketched out, and Paul's uncle, who follows the PC around making homophobic remarks, is hilariously unlikeable. A few examples of his dialogue (the second shows some of the sloppy writing, but this is about as bad as that gets):
"Alex, me boy! Didn't know I had to keep my back to the wall at this party! Haw! Haw!" He slaps you on the shoulder. "Ha ha, just kidding! I have nothing against queers personally!"
"You know how we could solve this finanical crisis? Just disallow women to work! They're stealing hard working men's job worse then foreigners."
In all, the humor is enough to carry this title as a whole, and gameplay is surprisingly robust for a Speed IF. I did run into a brick wall, literally, when I found that certain items it seemed that I needed for a puzzle couldn't be transported over the wall to Paul's garden or into his swimming pool (I needed two hands to climb or swim). Hopefully a walkthrough or hint system will be implemented later on, because I'm looking forward to seeing how this clever tale concludes.