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About the Storyit's a quest! Game Details
Language: English (en)
First Publication Date: April 7, 2017 Current Version: 1 Development System: Twine Forgiveness Rating: Nasty IFID: 019F79A3-18A0-4DA8-A0F7-AB711102B14F TUID: buptugo6n5h6nbt4 |
Awards
Entrant, Main Festival - Spring Thing 2017
Tags
Member Reviews
| Average Rating:  Number of Reviews: 3 Write a review |
Time cave RPG with sparse prose, May 17, 2017This is an RPG in the barest sense of the word. You choose a class. You encounter characters and go places, each narrated within the space of one line. The brevity of each passage belies a very broadly branching decision tree. In fact, given how widely stories could diverge, I found the narration of your choices in the end to be a nice touch. brevity quest makes liberal use of familiar tropes and creatures, making the reader's imagination take up most of the storytelling slack.
Several games share the text-sparse, location-based mould. A few which come to mind: The Tiniest Room, vale of singing metals or even burning temples.
What makes these worth having a look at are how they simplify foreign terrains, diplomatic moves and combat into the sparse language they use. I found pleasant small surprises, at times, when the game (brevity quest, but the others as well) showed me that it wasn't just branching blindly - it remembered the decisions that I made. Of course, this is technically very easy to do, but satisfying nonetheless.
Fun coffee break RPG, June 4, 2017As other reviewers have pointed out, brevity quest takes the stripped-down aesthetics of ultra-short Twine games (such as, for example, RPG-ish) and puts them to work in a more large-scale and sprawling (if fairly mechanically simple) RPG. You can choose between three different character classes, and several storylines are mutually exclusive, thus adding a large element of replayability.
Your feelings for brevity quest will probably depend on how you feel about unabashedly classic (or conventional?) Dungeons & Dragons tropes. Me, I enjoyed it enough to come back for multiple playthroughs. A lot of my enjoyment may be powered by nostalgia, but you know, it's exactly what I needed. The length feels just about perfect. It gets quite challenging early on (the mine quest), but only enough to make me determined to find a way through the obstacles, not enough to make me lose interest. Getting a winning ending is enough of a challenge to feel rewarding. The writing is, as mentioned, succinct, but clear and transparent.
While I described it as being mechanically simple, it's far from stupid. The ending screen tracks your adventures and skills, and while there's no over-arching plot, your previous actions may come to affect the events in later quests.
There are a few flaws that stop me from giving it five stars. Most importantly, it is up-front about being unfair and rife with learning-by-death. The author is disarmingly aware of this and suggests using the Undo button when needed, but the fact remains that picking options without having a fair chance of knowing the outcome hardly counts as "gameplay", any more than flipping a coin does. A minor issue is that the tone of the narration fluctuates a bit: the first couple of quests are written in a straight-faced manner, whereas later ones have a more tongue-in-cheek narration. Now, don't get me wrong: the comedy is good. (I particularly enjoyed the intro to the final dungeon.) Still, I might have enjoyed it more if it had been present from the start.
I also found a bug (I assume): in the final dungeon, during the battle against (Spoiler - click to show)the multi-armed monster, the game displays the links for both success and failure.
The story doesn't really break any new ground in terms of fantasy games: the enemies are conventional, the quests are mostly comfortable fantasy RPG tropes. If you don't have a problem with that, you won't have a problem with this game either.
To sum up: a polished, coffee break-sized fantasy quest. Exactly what it says on the tin, in other words. Recommended for everyone who wants a nostalgic, adventurous fantasy experience, or like their Twine to be on the "game" side of the spectrum.
An apparent microtwine adventure that is bigger than it seems, May 12, 2017This seems like a super small game (like TwinyJam or something) but is in fact quite large; the author claims it has "~29000 words in 723 nodes". It is strongly branching, but also pretty fun; it also has nice background changes, especially in the ocean scenes.
It's a fun game for a diversion. Recommended.
brevity quest on IFDB
Recommended Lists
brevity quest appears in the following Recommended Lists:Great "lunchtime length" games by MathBrush
These are games that can generally be completed in 30 minutes or less. Some can be completed much faster. Included in this list are games that have multiple endings that can individually be reached quickly. It also includes several Twiny...
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