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Number of Reviews: 13
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5 people found the following review helpful:
A tiny Odyssey game running in an in-browser C64 emulator, October 6, 2020Nick Montfort wrote Ad Verbum, a great wordplay game that predates both Andrew Schultz and Emily Short’s wordplay games (but not Nord nor Bert), and has since then done a lot with the intersection between text and software.
I had heard a lot about this game, mostly consternation and mystery.
I’m happy to take this game at face-value. Without digging deeper, this reminds me of ASCII and the Argonauts, but slightly less complex.
In this game, you are presented with yes/no options on what kind of interactions to have with a scrambled group of towns. It seems that there is a pattern on what to do (and I was able to be right more than half of the time, so either there is a pattern or the game is good at making you feel there is a pattern, which there’s not really much of a difference there).
I’ve always had a fondness for little games done well. I came up with my current star-rating system on IFDB just so I could feel consistent giving the tiny micro-game ‘Creak, Creak’ and ‘Counterfeit Monkey’ both 5/5.
So, yeah, this is cool. Not what I expected from Nick Montfort, but then again I didn’t know what to expect, and this definitely fits his recent work. If more about the game is uncovered, that’s fine, but I kind of like its meditative simplicity.
+Polish: It does exactly what it sets out to do.
+Descriptiveness: I found that it packed in meaning in small chunks.
+Interactivity: I liked discovering the pattern.
+Emotional impact: I'm still pondering on sacrificing to Gods of a dusty planet.
+Would I play again? Yeah, I think I'll take another look at it.
2 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
likely a critique or satire on conventions in retro-gaming, October 5, 2020Written for the Commodore in 2020, the game seems to be a joke or criticism on world-building, marketing, and player/designer expectations in games, esp. games of that era.
I think the nature of the game requires reading the bundled documentation before play. So don't ignore this for the full gaming experience.
The player controls a ship on its way home, able to make y/n decisions on its attempt to reach home safely.
(Spoiler - click to show)The Y/N options seem to be calculated based on probability or are random. You can get two different responses by answering Y to the same question, or you can get the same response for a Y then a N.
The documentation states the player will enjoy the immersive world by making such weighty decisions. Yet, it is more like pressing a button that is hooked up to nothing. I played through 4 times: mixing y/n, then all Y and then all N. No discernible difference each time.
If one desires to see how a short game and its promotional material can parody the activity of gaming (or, perhaps more narrowly, a genre/era of gaming), then go ahead and give this ten minutes.
4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
Not So Twisty Passages, Yet All Alike, October 3, 2020I grew up on BASIC and Commodore 64 games, so all my appropriate nostalgia cylinders were firing. Unfortunately, this game is so incredibly basic I’m unable to find the appeal. In fact, this was the type of game when I was a kid that I loathed, what with only binary choices and extremely vague descriptions. I have to believe this is intentionally terrible, a meta joke as it were. For example, you can get the exact same option twice in a row and get different results for the same choice, making one believe the strategy guide included is indeed part of the joke.
I played this longer than I normally would have given the author. Bravo to Montfort for taking the effort to program in an ancient language.
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