External Links


Story File
Requires a Glulx interpreter. Visit IFWiki for download links.
Walkthrough
A detailed synopsis.
Competition version
Requires a Glulx interpreter. Visit IFWiki for download links.
Walkthrough and maps
by David Welbourn

Have you played this game?

You can rate this game, record that you've played it, or put it on your wish list after you log in.

Playlists and Wishlists

RSS Feeds

New member reviews
Updates to external links
All updates to this page

Bullhockey!

by B F Lindsay profile

Episode 1 of Bullhockey
Scavenger Hunt
2018

(based on 8 ratings)
2 reviews

About the Story

Your girlfriend has left you, leaving disturbing notes.

And she--oops--lost your laundry. In various places. Around town.

You can't have her back. But you can try to get your laundry.


Game Details


Awards

49th Place - 24th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2018)

Tags

- View the most common tags (What's a tag?)

(Log in to add your own tags)
Tags you added are shown below with checkmarks. To remove one of your tags, simply un-check it.

Enter new tags here (use commas to separate tags):

Member Reviews

5 star:
(2)
4 star:
(3)
3 star:
(3)
2 star:
(0)
1 star:
(0)
Average Rating:
Number of Reviews: 2
Write a review


4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Old-school puzzlefest that could use more polish, December 4, 2018

Bullhockey! is a massive, sprawling, old-school text adventure. (Think 1990s, not 1980s; it's not as old-school as Flowers of Mysteria or Escape from Dinosaur Island, two other games in IFComp 2018.) It reminds me some of Curses!. Both games start out with you in your home, in a relatively mundane and real-life situation. Then, as you play through the game and begin to solve puzzles, the story takes several twists and eventually turns into something odd, supernatural, and even - at times - surreal.

I loved Curses!, and there's a lot about Bullhockey! that I enjoyed as well. But I couldn't shake the feeling while playing Bullhockey! that I was watching an Olympic figure skater try for a triple axel with a double toe loop and just not quite nail the landing.

To me, Bullhockey! feels both heavily implemented and underimplemented. That may sound like a contradiction, but they actually go together. It's heavily implemented in the sense that there are a lot of objects - especially at the beginning, when you're still in your apartment - that appear in the game. However, only a few of those are actually relevant for solving puzzles or advancing the story. So, as the player, you spend a lot of time interacting with these objects but not making progress toward your current goal. Because there are so many objects, though, there's no way that the author can anticipate all the different things that a player will try. This means that there are plenty of reasonable actions that a player will take that aren’t implemented - or that just give the default response when the default response isn’t quite appropriate. Sometimes this means that the player is sent the wrong signal on a puzzle or runs into a guess-the-verb problem. To take a very early example, while you're still in your apartment one of your first goals is to turn off the ceiling fan that is annoying you. One thing I tried was
(Spoiler - click to show)
> THROW STAFF AT SWITCH

to which the game responds

Futile.


This is Inform's default response for this action, yet the action is not that far from the intended solution for the puzzle. Moreover, the act I attempted turns out to be the right idea for another quite similar puzzle, much later in the game!

For a game this size, (and Bullhockey! is huge) it also feels undertested. (There are only two testers listed in the credits.) I'd say another five testers willing to play through the entire game would have resulted in the removal of much of the underclued feeling with certain puzzles, parts that felt underimplemented, or places where the default response was misleading.

I feel like I'm being more critical than I am with most of my reviews. This is because I think Bullhockey! has the makings to be one of the great puzzlefests in the old-school style, and I love puzzlefests in the old-school style. It's got wacky, clever puzzles that... just often need to be clued better. It has delightful responses to many actions I tried, but... with other, equally-reasonable actions it doesn't recognize them or just gives the default response. It has complicated sequences that lead you along just right in places... but then has other places where I would have never gotten through without the walkthrough.

Maybe "polish" is the word I'm really looking for here. More polish, and Bullhockey! could become one of those diamonds of an old-school puzzlefest that many of us in the IF community still relish.

Now that I've critiqued Bullhockey! for a while, let me mention a few things I particularly enjoyed. Many parts of the game are quite funny, like the scoring system. There's a sly running joke about various locations that you attempt to enter that I enjoyed. Also, exchanges like this one:
(Spoiler - click to show)
> GO UP.
Maybe you should try flapping your wings?
> FLAP WINGS.
I was being sarcastic.

Some of the puzzles are total Rube Goldberg machines that once you see how they work you have to sit back and marvel at which you've just done. Two of the most prominent are (Spoiler - click to show)the literal Rube Goldberg machine in the science museum that's being built (and I mean the entire thing, including the trampoline on the men's clothing store and the fact that you end up back in your apartment!) and the extended sequence that starts in the amusement park and ends with you in jail. Several of the other puzzles have this feel as well.

I also really enjoyed the solution to the puzzle where you are standing at a dot. I'm not sure it's an entirely fair puzzle, in that it requires outside knowledge, but I loved the solution - and am a little proud that I got it without having to resort to the walkthrough. :)

If you like old-school puzzlefests, you will probably enjoy Bullhockey!. Just don't be ashamed to have a walkthrough handy.

(As a final note, I was pleased to read that the author is planning a Bullhockey! 2. I look forward to playing it.)

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
A big, densely described puzzle game about a girlfriend's revenge, November 17, 2018
by MathBrush
Related reviews: 2-10 hours

This IFComp 2018 parser game is big and pretty tough.

I beta tested this game. You play as a person whose girlfriend has supposedly left them, trashing the house and hiding your clothes all over the town.

This is, I think, the author's first publicly released game, and a big one. It's clear while playing it that the author got better and better at programming and writing as it goes along. Thus, the first area is the sketchiest/most obtuse, while the later areas are an improvement. I recommend perhaps consulting the walkthrough until you leave the house, to get a feel for the game, then going wild.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | View comments (1) - Add comment 

Bullhockey! on IFDB

Recommended Lists

Bullhockey! appears in the following Recommended Lists:

"My apartment" games by MathBrush
It's a trope in interactive fiction that first time author's tend to model their own home or apartment in detail as an experiment in programming. To see if this trope is true, I've created a list of 'my apartment' games. Because in most...

My new walkthroughs for June 2020 by David Welbourn
On Friday June 26, 2020, I published new walkthroughs for the games and stories listed below! (The walkthroughs for Bullhockey! and Under the Bed were published in May, but I'm adding them to this list because I didn't make a list in May...

Big, non-linear adventure games with score system by MathBrush
These are classic-style games, where you have to collect a large variety of objects while exploring a cave or building. My favorite way to play these games is to start playing without hints, mapping out the world and seeing what all I...

Polls

The following polls include votes for Bullhockey!:

Games with amusement parks/fairgrounds in them by Cerfeuil
Games that feature carnivals, fairgrounds, amusement parks, circuses, etc. Of any kind!

Games with flavor text by OverThinking
I'm looking for games where background events and flavor text appear frequently, independently of the player's actions. Maybe there's wind blowing around objects, or someone's making a lot of noise in the kitchen. Bonus points for...

First attempt IF by beecadee
Anyone wanting to write IF has to start somewhere. Looking for games that were authors' first attempts... First attempts in a given development system count!




This is version 15 of this page, edited by Zape on 1 December 2020 at 6:22pm. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item - Delete This Page