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Number of Reviews: 6
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1-6 of 64 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
Creative and fun, December 31, 2022You're sent into the wide land of Threediopolis. Your new employer, Ed Dunn, has a list of places he wants you to visit so you can complete tasks for him. But, in this realm, it's not about where you're going as much as how you get there.
Threediopolis is a game that seems overwhelming at first. You have 40 tasks and 10 friends to find. Every place is signified by a 3 digit number and a cryptic description. At first, I was wandering around without a clue. (Spoiler - click to show)I decided to figure out how my movements effected the numbers, then honed in on one place that wasn't far from the start. I had to go down, north, and east. Easy. I tried every combination of these... but when I went north, east, and then down and met a guy named Ned, I suddenly realized what this game was. It's a word game!
(Spoiler - click to show)You have 6 directions, using letters, and you have to spell words with them. Like SEEDS takes you to a gardening supply store, DUNES takes you to a desert, and WEENERS is a hot dog restaurant. There's also a bunch of bonuses if you type things like SENSUS (you fill out a census forum), SUDDEN (a loud noise startles you), and SEUSS (you meet a Dr. Seuss creature). If you can't work something out from the text description, you can try to figure it out with the numbers.
I was able to finish all the tasks and find all the friends, but you don't have to. You can return to Ed at any point to turn in your list and get a final score. The postgame gives you a list of 80 bonus tasks, some of which you may complete over the course of the regular game.
Overall, I found Threediopolis to be a fun time. The writing is witty and funny, even wrong expeditions will reward you with something amusing, and it's not that long or difficult once you get the hang of it.
3 of
5 people found the following review helpful:
More a wordgame than IF, January 29, 2017I found the beginning, figuring out the way the game works, very frustrating. It's very unclear what parts of the initial setup are clues and what aren't, and the many user interface options make it really unclear what text is important and what is meaningless flavor. This contributed to making the intentionally-underspecified rules for the puzzle frustrating. Even how the game indicates which tasks are completed and which are not was not initially clear to me.
Honestly, it feels like a clever puzzle bolted onto a parser interface that doesn't fit it well. I feel like a non-parser interface could present the relevant information about remaining goals in a clearer, simpler way without presenting so many interface options and without losing anything.
That said, the puzzle system is unique and was fun once I figured out the rules and I did enjoy the game quite a bit.
4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
A pure word puzzle game with interesting mechanics, February 3, 2016This game is by Andrew Schultz, a noted author of puzzle and wordplay games. You go around a three dimensional city with a list of tasks and addresses to complete them at.
Part of the game is just figuring out what is going on, which I didn't experience, as I already knew the premise.
The puzzles in this game are challenging but fun. Andrew has made it easier by not requiring you to solve every puzzle to beat the game.
A must-play for fans of wordplay.
0 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
A fun word puzzle, not well-suited for IF, March 9, 2014I enjoyed this as a word puzzle, but the IF game wrapper didn't add much and in fact made it a little more awkward.
5 of
6 people found the following review helpful:
Wow, I just got this., October 30, 2013I originally reviewed this shortly after playing it during the IF Competition, which was a mistake. The stress/strain of having limited time to play brought out a (bizarre) inability to even figure out the basic mechanism at play.
I've since re-played it: it is very, very clever, but far from impossible.
Don't spoil this one: most of the joy is in figuring out the mechanic and exploring it.
On top of the excellent puzzle mechanic, the writing is good, fun, and crisp.
4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
Neat concept, but gets somewhat tedious towards the end, October 19, 2013This game is about wordplay, and it's mostly about figuring this particular puzzle out in a systematic manner (almost no objects to interact with, which in this case is fine).
You are given a list of tasks to accomplish, and each of them implies figuring out a specific command related to the constraint at play here. You can figure out about half of them fairly easily, then you realize that you missed a few more; you then get somewhat stuck, but luckily you can use the room numbers to try to get more information about the rest of the commands (very wise from the author to have included those, the game would be simply too hard without them). And then, there's the last lousy ones, including obscure ones (also, it's not very clear that you can combine two words, so you can get stuck on the longer words for a while if you don't realize that).
Apart from those commands, there's a few more that generate a (usually funny) response from the game - which is an interesting design choice (it could have been than any valid command would give you a point, but it's not; although I feel some of those "extra" commands could have been on the task list, which could have bumped the tedious ones off the list and made the game less frustrating). But yay for Big Lebowski references.
The writing was actually somewhat underwhelming, I found. Responses to valid commands rarely go for longer than one line, which doesn't really make it that rewarding. (I know writing 45 different responses is soul-crushing, but here I feel it's a necessary evil!!) The end message (for completing the task list) is incredibly underwhelming too. ((Spoiler - click to show)We spend hours running around, putting things in a quantum shoebox to prepare a mysterious party, please tell us how the party went, if the boss was pleased, how we managed to fill the room with the box's contents, anything!). I did notice a few typos, and a non-critical bug, but nothing more.
To sum up, it's almost all about that wordplay puzzle, which is fun and challenging, making the experience enjoyable but a little rough.
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