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>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction
PPQP certainly wants to be a funny game, and it does have some genuinely hilarious moments. Unfortunately, much of the game is buggy, error-laden, and tedious, and nothing saps my sense of humor more quickly and completely than those three things. In addition, the game seems to have caught the same disease from which Laura Knauth's Travels in the Land of Erden suffers (perhaps I'll start calling it Erdenitis): a great deal of swelling and very little focus. The walkthrough goes on for 17 screens. This isn't a two hour game, folks (see my review of Erden for further comments on this.) Even setting aside the game's size, it has both surface problems (lots of grammar and spelling errors, a number of serious bugs) and deeper ones (badly designed puzzles.)
A big game with underclued puzzles and moderate humor, July 5, 2017This game is part of a peculiar brand of IFComp games that are very large, moderately well-implemented, and deeply underclued. Someone said that such game suffer from Erden-itis, from "Travels in the land of Erden', an exemplar of this class of games. Other such games include Town Dragon, The Sueno, Varkana, and a host of others.
You have a big city here, a castle, and a very large endgame. Most of the puzzles involve things that would never occur for you to do on your own.
(Sort of like if you meet a random person in a game. Are you supposed to attack them? Say 'hi'? Ask them about themself? It turns out you are supposed to 'INSULT PERSON'. Why? It makes sense out of the world, but why would it make sense in the world?)
Baf's Guide
Thoroughly silly, as the title indicates. You're to hunt down the ingredients for a pizza in a jokey fantasy-land. Lots of puzzles turn on silly puns, and a few others on adolescent humor, but there are a few funny moments and some genuinely original puzzles, particularly in the endgame. Implementation problems--bugs and illogicalities--don't help, but this isn't a terrible effort if you can stomach the puns. Walkthrough included in the game file.
-- Duncan Stevens
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