A Collection of Reviews of
ADRIFT Games Which People Have Written But They Might Not Necessarily be all Adrift
Games that People are Writing Reviews Of
ISSUE 9
EDITED BY
PUBLISHED ON 1 JULY 2006
EDITED BY
PUBLISHED ON 1 JULY 2006
For
Love of Digby – reviewed by Robert Street
The Potter
and the Mould – reviewed by D.L Sun, David Whyld and TDS
It’s
Easter Peeps!– reviewed by David Whyld and TDS
SERE
(Survive, Evade, Resist, Escape) – reviewed by David Whyld and TDS
The
Warlord, the Princess and the Bulldog – reviewed by Lumin
The
Reliques of Tolti-Aph – reviewed by David Whyld
Damnatio
Memoriae – reviewed by David Whyld
Pantomime
– reviewed by David Whyld
List
of games reviewed in this issue and previous issues
Welcome to the ninth edition of the Reviews
Exchange. Unfortunately, the following issue is a little shorter than some of
the previous issues. This is mainly due to the lack of games in recent months.
At the heart of this lack of games is the fact that there hasn’t been any
competition recently. The ADRIFT community only rarely produces games outside
of competitions. I’m as guilty of this as anyone, with only one non-comp game
released (and this was later entered in a competition anyway).
Are competitions a good thing? I would still say
so, as they provide motivation for games to be finished. There have not been
more non-comp games, despite the ADRIFT Spring Comp being discontinued this
year. Feedback is often better around competitions, even if this feedback is
sometimes no better than a final ranking. I have to admit competitions do
appeal to my competitive instincts as well.
The price to pay for having competitions does seem
to be less non-comp games and slow periods, but I still think that this is
worth it. Others may have different opinions though.
Thank you to David Whyld, D.L Sun, Lumin and TDS
for contributing below.
AUTHOR: DAVID WHYLD
PLATFORM: ADRIFT 4.00
REVIEWER:
For Love of
Digby is
reminiscent of another David Whyld game, Paint!!!.
This is a favourable comparison, given that Paint!!! won the ADRIFT Game of the Year award in 2004 and I
enjoyed For Love of Digby just as
much.
For Love of
Digby is a
one room comedy game, where you have to get your television remote fixed
without leaving the couch. As expected, the writing is very well done and it is
actually very amusing in places, as you can probably guess just be looking at
the game’s premise. There isn’t much story in this game, with a steady stream
of jokes instead.
The main difficulty I had with this game was the
lack of focus. Certain actions had to be performed to trigger events in the
future, which led to further actions and so on. Why some of these actions lead
to the television remote being fixed was difficult to tell. It was just a
matter of trying stuff because it was there. It took me a while before I
successfully managed to finish the game. I’m still not sure why the end
solution worked and the other solutions didn’t.
Overall, the game is enjoyable as light
entertainment, despite being a little frustrating in its unpredictableness in
places.
Score – 7/10
AUTHOR:
PLATFORM: ADRIFT 4.00
REVIEWER: D.L SUN
(RAINBOWSCAPE)
This review
contains spoilers.
Cross the bridge.
This was one of the first commands I typed and when I was not
understood, I had little hope for the rest of the game.
But I was pleasantly surprised.
Mould is a superhero game, but not in the
traditional sense. The introduction
starts you off as a perfectly normal individual, but an accident endows you
with a small amount of superpowers and you become a superhero in training.
Yes, a sidekick.
From there the story progresses through a series of
chapters and time jumps. It is not
uncommon to have months pass between scenes.
The story continues on and with the passage of
time, and several life changes, our protagonist progresses from reluctant and
sometimes resentful sidekick to full-fledged superhero.
I enjoyed the piece and felt like I participated in
the story being told. At times there
were a few push-me pull-me bits where I felt the character made decisions that
the player had no choice but to go along with.
For example, that battle with the blue imp is sprung upon you and there
doesn't seem to be any other options but to fight it. What if your choice was to let the imp take
the amulet and become Mould? I know this
might have ended the story sooner and left loose threads hanging but it could
have been an option. Especially since
the PC toyed with the idea of leading a normal life forever, I felt the author
might have allowed for alternate endings.
If there are alternate endings where the PC rejects the idea of becoming
a superhero and I did not find them, my apologies.
The only time I was tossed out of the game world
was at the mall. It seemed strange that
the PC had to push Waterfall in order for her explain her back story and also
odd that she kept saying, "Push me east or nw etc." Maybe if
Waterfall had said, "Push me over here so I can check out that sale I've
heard about," I wouldn't have thought this part so forced. On the other hand, making me explore the mall
was an excellent idea because I remembered objects I had seen before, and had
good idea of how to solve problems with some of them later.
As for the iconic Mould, the oft-mentioned but
rarely present original superhero, I thought that character back-story was very
well done. I especially enjoyed one of
the twists of that storyline, involving the Mould's true identity.
As long as it seemed, when the game ended, the
resolution felt sudden and left a few questions behind. Still, it was fun to play and, with a plot
that keeps you interested until the very end, I recommend it.
REVIEWER: DAVID WHYLD
Superhero games have
always been a favourite of mine since I was a kid so I warmed to this one
immediately. Although, saying that, none of the heroes or the villains
presented here, particularly the title characters, were really that super. The
Potter was a remarkably poor supervillain and the Mould’s sole power is to
change his body into different shapes. The main character is even worse off.
Bearing the unflattering superhero moniker of Handmade, he can only transform
his hand into different shapes. As far as competing with comic book superheroes
and villains like Spiderman or Doctor Octopus, the Potter, the Mould and
Handmade come off as a poor substitute.
You play the part of a
helpless bystander, rescued by the Mould from drowning and gifted with a
portion of his powers in the process. You assume the name Handmade (not quite
the new Magneto or Wolverine unfortunately) and join forces with the Mould to
fight crime. (Although what use a guy who can only change his hand into
different shapes is going to be in a fight with genuine supervillains is
debatable.) You're joined along the way by a superheroine called Waterfall who
can transform her body into water at will and use it to combat crime.
Some of the game is
told in flask back, detailing the events which led to Handmade becoming a
superhero (the aforementioned drowning) and the death of his parents at the
hands of the Potter (the supervillain of the piece), culminating in present day
events and heading to the Potter’s lair to do battle with the evil tyrant.
While Handmade himself
isn't much of a superhero, his nifty trick of changing his hand into different
items is a nice one and allows for quite a bit of variety in gameplay. Type
MOULD and you're offered a choice of things you might like to mould your hand
into. While I’d have preferred a choice to mould my hand into anything I felt
like (a machine gun would have been useful in some of the situations), there's
a fair bit of choice on offer. Sometimes you'll even find yourself with several
possibilities for mould shapes, all of which seem equally viable at the
time.
Difficulty-wise, The Potter & The Mould is a fairly
straightforward game with a few puzzles scattered along the way, but little that
should stop people in their tracks for any length of time. There's only one bit
I had trouble with – a fight with a shape-shifting imp – that took a while to
get past due to the random nature of the imp’s attacks. Just as you can change
a part of your body into different weapons during the fight, so can the imp (or
its whole body actually), thus getting the better of it is often a case of
bashing in one command after another and hoping something works. There seemed
to be a kind of logic to the way the imp attacked, and which mould shape I
should use in turn, but I found it easier to simply type in one command after
another until I beat it. On the plus side, the imp’s attacks seem to cause me
precious little damage so the fight itself wasn’t life-threatening, just
lengthy.
My main criticism of
the game, aside from the weakness of the superhero and -villain characters, was
that Handmade never really gets to perform much in the way of superhero
actions. His one power isn't up to much and most of the time he seems to make
his way through the game doing little more than the average guy in the street
could do. Even when fighting a couple of supervillains attacking a mall, he
defeats them by more mundane means and seldom has to use his powers. For that
matter, use of the items you can mould you hand into is sometimes buggy. During
the fight with the supervillains at the mall, I was given the option of
moulding my hand into a number of weapons, a bat and a whip being two of them,
yet trying to hit my enemies with these items never got me anywhere.
The only other negative
aspect of the game was that it was a little too linear for my liking. I would
have preferred to explore a bit and maybe make my way to the confrontation with
the supervillain on my own. Still, there's a fair amount of freedom in the
areas you can explore so you can’t really claim you're being forced down a set
path.
Overall I liked this
game and rated it as my favourite in the Spring Thing 2006. I’d look forward to
another one in the same theme but preferably with a superhero who is really
super.
7 out of 10
REVIEWER: TDS
In this game you play a fledgling superhero that
makes his way to the top while destroying bad guys left and right along the
way. The premise isn't one I like but I decided to give this one a try. I
wasn't disappointed.
The game starts off with the origin of your
character's superpowers and goes through your training stages until you are a
fully fledged hero and get to take out the main baddies. This isn't just some
game you're thrown into with a guy that already has fully matured powers and
you must now figure out how to use them. In this game, your player learns how
to use his powers at the same pace as you. And unlike some superhero games, the
protagonist actually has a buffet of ways to use his powers.
The game's writing is above average and it keeps
you interested in the story as it moves along. Only a couple flaws I noticed
while playing through. I found the room descriptions to be...large. Almost
every one was about seven or eight lines long, and that's without the many
scenes that occur in the game. Most descriptions are meaty because the author
does a little too much telling instead of leaving the scene to speak for
itself. However, when the time does come for the author to take over a little
more and give the character a voice I am disapointed. In one very emotional
scene the player shows less emotion than he would if a fly landed on his arm.
Despite the loads of backstory and extraordinary abilities the player is really
a dull guy. At the same time he's not quite the faceless, nameless adventurer
of old text adventures. The story is predictable for the most part, and
mountains of text make bearing it a less enjoyable task.
As I said before, this hero has powers he can
actually use. He's not some average Joe with a superhero costume. The Mould can
turn parts of his body into pretty much anything within reason. Due to the
obvious constraints of IF you are given a limited choice at any appropriate
time. This opens up the game to more original puzzles and situations you
otherwise wouldn't be able to go through. This part of the game was done well
as you get to use logic you otherwise wouldn't have considered to solve
puzzles. Also there are battle scenes in some parts of the game. They don't use
the standard ADRIFT battle system(thank God) and it does an even better job of
conveying the action. You choose what you want to do and must judge wisely in
accordance with your villain's actions. It isn't overused to the point of
annoyance nor underused to the point of obscurity.
The game lasted me about two hours and it doesn't
have a particularly hard puzzle. Near the end of the game I started to get tired
of reading the tons of text coming up every turn. The game is your standard
adventure with a few unique aspects and if you play slowly it may last a little
longer than a day. Overall it's a fun game but beware there is plenty of story
to digest so don't just expect a puzzlefest.
6/10
AUTHOR: SARA
PLATFORM: ADRIFT 4.00
REVIEWER: DAVID WHYLD
The sole ADRIFT entry in a recent one room comp (it
came sixth out of nine entries, although as it was an Italian website hosting
the comp and seven of the entries were in Italian, that’s not as bad as it
sounds), It’s Easter, Peeps! is
quite a charming little game. Little in the sense that it takes place in just a
single room.
The premise is a simple one: it’s Easter and you’ve
got to collect items for an Easter basket for your son, Max. To make matters
easier, Max has helpfully provided you with a list of the items that he needs.
All you have to do is find them and place them in the basket given to you by
the shopkeeper the moment you enter his candy store.
Unusually for a game by a newcomer, It’s Easter, Peeps! shows a good level
of testing and has responses for most of the things I tried. The faults I came
across – examining the candy coin shows me a description of the candy in the
display case being the worst – are relatively minor and forgivable given
ADRIFT’s often poor handling of items with similar names. It was also kind of
annoying when I tried to open the display case, had the shopkeeper tell me that
he had the key to it (albeit a figurative key rather than a literal one) but
attempts to ask him about the key resulted in the game asking me Which
key. House key or car key? and then
responding with Shopkeeper does not respond to your question no matter what I
typed. The shopkeeper is quite a helpful chap for the most part and questioning
him about various things is a good idea, but here he was less than forthcoming.
Most of the items are easy enough to find but the
means of getting hold of some of them are a little odd. I found a number of the
items by vandalising part of the store, yet the shopkeeper, rather than getting
all irate over me smashing up his livelihood, instead seemed quite pleased that
I’d thought of this course of action. Then again, the shopkeeper is an unusual
character full stop. He doesn’t even ask me for payment for the items that I
took from his store!
I finished the game after quite a bit of head
scratching (and the occasional peek in the Generator! (yes, I'm weak)) but a
few things were never explained to me. What was the significance of the coded
note? I never did discover if it actually does anything or was simply a red
herring. As I finished the game without discovering what it meant, it clearly
wasn’t a big deal. The phone, too, I never discovered a use for, even though a
message I found indicated the phone might well serve a purpose.
All in all, It’s
Easter, Peeps! is a nice enough game which ought to keep you occupied for a
while. It’s certainly way better than average as far as games by newcomers are
concerned.
6 out of 10
REVIEWER: TDS
It's the week before
Easter, and you've popped out of your office one day on your lunch break. Your mission?
To assemble an Easter basket that will both delight and mystify your
4-year-old son Max.
A parent shopping for an easter basket for his
child is an interesting concept for an IF game and I was eager to see how this
played out. Unfortunately the game was just as exciting as its intro.
For the entire game you look around a candy store
for items on your son's list to put in his easter basket. At first I thought
that was just a cover and really when trying to buy a creme egg aliens would blast
through the wall or something. Nothing of that sort happens in this game. It's
pretty boring the entire time.
From start to finish the game remains very upbeat.
I've never played a game where things were so happy-go-lucky before. Either the
game was written for children or the author was just in a cheerful mood when
making this game. I noticed the shopkeeper in the game ends almost every other
sentence with an exclamation mark. Here's a dialogue snippet:
>ask shopkeeper about
store
"I've been running
this place for 35 years now. Can't
imagine doing anything else. I love the
sight of a smiling child! Or even an
adult every now and then, mind you!"
Cheesy? Oh yes.
On a technical level everything is fine, except for
a little problem with ambiguity I ran across. The gameplay is a bore unless
you're a fiend for short puzzlefests.
Although I don't favor games that are on the
overwhelmingly light side, I don't dislike the game because of that. The game
is light-hearted...so where's the humor? I played through the game a couple
times to be sure I didn't miss some nugget of comedy or at least an attempt. I
found nothing.
For a one room game I guess it succeeds. Although
for a short distraction I can point you towards games more interesting that are
also sprinkled with comedy. I can't recommend this to anyone.
4/10
AUTHOR: SKYPIG
PLATFORM: ADRIFT 4.00
REVIEWER: DAVID WHYLD
This review
is based on the first version of the game.
A new ADRIFT game and a new author to boot. Quite a
rarity these days. So is SERE - Survive,
Evade, Resist, Escape any good? Unfortunately not…
You play the part of a soldier in some unspecified
war zone whose helicopter crashes, everyone else dies and you are the only
survivor. You have to get back to friendly territory and evade capture for as
long as you can.
The intro is poorly written, riddled with more than
a few spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. YOUR LEANING ON YOUR MACHINE
GUN SCANNING, OUT THE WINDOW FOR ANYTHING OUT OF THE ORDINARY. Maybe it's just
me, but every time I find a typo of any kind in the introduction to a game, I
wince. By the time I'd finished the intro to this game, I was pretty much
permanently wincing. Frequent misspellings of "you're" as
"your" are rife throughout the game. It also suffers from some pretty
frustrating guess the verb problems, some of which are made harder by typos in
the text that lead you to try one thing when another is expected. Examine the
equipment in the crashed helicopter and you're told you can see your tool box
(note the space between the words!) Yet every attempt to OPEN TOOL BOX or
EXAMINE TOOL BOX met with YOU SEE NO SUCH THING. It seems you have to refer to
it as "toolbox" (all one word) for the game to understand what you
mean. It doesn't understand box unfortunately.
The player starts with a loaded pistol which, for
some reason which probably seemed like a good idea at the time, I decided to
remove the magazine from. Later on, I came across an enemy soldier who I tried
to shoot so I put the magazine back in the pistol, only to be told by the game
that the pistol wasn't loaded. Oh yes, it was. The debugger even confirmed this
to me but no matter what I typed, I couldn't seem to get the game to accept
this. In the end, I had to restart the game to make any further progress. As it
happens, the command LOAD PISTOL was bugged anyway as every time I tried it,
ADRIFT assumed I meant to 'load' a new game and didn't process the command.
Funnily enough, LOAD FLARE worked fine for the pen flare, even though you can
fire it at the end of the game whether you've loaded it or not.
You can die very easily in this game if you're not
careful, and sometimes even if you are. A few times the game assumes you're
trying to carry out a command that you might not be, executes that command, and
as a result kills you off. I found a truck and tried to examine it. The game
apparently decided that by EXAMINE TRUCK I actually meant to APPROACH TRUCK so
it helpfully carried out that action for me and then promptly had me shot dead.
You can also die at other times when you're given a kind of CYOA choice of do
this, do that or the other. Pick the wrong one - and there's no way of knowing
beforehand which is right and which is wrong - and you die.
My final annoyance with the game (although there
are many others that I haven't mentioned in this review) involved an item
showing up only after a certain point in the game. Examine something when you
first come across it and you see no indication of an item being there, examine
it later and, lo and behold, the item has shown up, although there's no
explanation for why it's there now but wasn't before. (Oh, and for my definite
final annoyance with the game, USE PLIERS ON IGNITION is a nasty bit of guess
the verb.)
SERE -
Survive, Evade, Resist, Escape is a short-ish game, ten or so minutes from start
to finish if you can figure your way past the guess the verb problems and
general getting killed every few moves. It's not the worst game by a newbie
I've ever played (Death Agency still holds that record by quite a margin), but
it's in definite need of being run through a spell and grammar check, as well
as some serious testing. Even if you're a fan of war games, and I can't say I
am, this one probably won't hold a lot of appeal for you.
2 out of 10
REVIEWER: TDS
You never saw what hit
you. Your first thought was that your pilots
were flying too low, too fast and struck a tree or a mountain top. Then you heard the pilots screaming
"SAM, SAM, we're hit!" Shock,
fear, panic. Not one of your drunken
boastings ever included peeing in your pants but thats between you and God if
you don't make it out of this.
In this game you play a soldier whose plane has
crashed and must survive the enemy that happens to patrol the forest you end up
in. It's a concept that you don't see everyday in IF and I wish there were more
espionage/military games out there. Unfortunately this one doesn't exactly
bring glory to the genre.
It's a short game so it doesn't depend on its story
to carry it. The story is placed at the beginning and end of the game, as I
expected. I didn't expect an epic storyline from a game that's short like this
but a quick snippet of what the player was doing before the attack would be
nice. The writing isn't the greatest as you might tell from the introduction
but it passes for standard text adventure fare. The problems don't really start
with the "fiction" but rather the "interactive" part of the
game.
This game goes out of its way to present itself
with a flashy intro with colors, music, and a menu that adds nothing to the
game itself. Although that I don't mind. What I do mind is the screen
refreshing itself every time I enter a new room or type "look".
Having the screen clear all the time makes me wonder what was the point of the
author doing this. Almost every room or description in the game is indented yet
there are some that aren't. Trying to spice the game up in that way fails
because it isn't consistent.There are odd breaks in the text and the incongrous
use of colors scattered throughout the game makes things look even worse.
I think less time should've been spent on
presentation, and more time spent on the actual game. Guess-the-verb gets so
bad it's ridiculous. It seems like the author has only one command for most
things to be done. I tried "shoot sniper" and later found out I had
to "fire at sniper" despite the intro telling me that was the correct
syntax to use. The game is lazy when it comes to descriptions. Sometimes three
or four distinct objects are covered with one description. Other times you
won't even get a description. Other times you'll get a description...for
another object!
As I said before, there is guess-the-verb and it
makes solving puzzles a pain. There are numerous ways to say and do things but
the author restricts you to just one. I definitely wouldn't have guessed the
wording used in some situations without the aid of a walkthrough.
Guess-the-verb even ruins cool concepts such as looking through a sniper rifle
using rooms to navigate your line of sight. Sometimes I get killed and am
flashed to a poorly-done "game over" room. More bad presentation.
I think the game could be better if more attention
was paid to the gift rather than the gift wrapping. Because of this the game
doesn't rank highly to me.
3/10
AUTHOR: DAVID WHYLD
PLATFORM: ADRIFT 4.00
REVIEWER: LUMIN
I've never been a big fan of puzzle-heavy games,
both because I find myself more drawn in when the 'F' part of IF is the most prominent,
and because I'm just no good at solving the things unless I've got a
walkthrough handy. But David Whyld's The
Warlord, the Princess, and the Bulldog is, simply put, the best Adrift game
I've ever played. It's also one some the best IF I've ever played, taking a
place in my mental 'Top Five' list that until now has never been graced by a
single pure puzzler. Poor David may well have shot himself in the foot with
this one, because any of his future games are inevitably going to be compared
to it.
While technically the sequel to A Spot of Bother, a game I had played
previously and had been rather underwhelmed by, WPB can (and probably should)
be enjoyed with no knowledge of the original, and when you start it up it's
evident almost from the very first room that it's lightyears ahead of its
predecessor.
In fact, David's done so many things right with
this one that I hardly know where to start. The game was an entry in the Spring
Thing and thus is quite a bit larger than average, but despite the size the
writing is solid throughout, and except in a few minor cases mercifully bug and
typo free. I can't even imagine the work that went into testing this one, let
alone writing it in the first place.
To begin with, let's talk about aesthetics. The
game just looks GOOD. In fact I never realized how blah the default look of
Adrift was until I played this one and saw how much of an effect taking a
little care with the fonts and presentation could have. There are also little
touches like clearing the screen for every new room, an oldschool convention
I've never really cared for, that somehow work here and add to the overall
impression of professionalism.
But okay, I know, real IF aficionados couldn't care
less about APPEARANCE; it's all about the gameplay, right? Well, I'm happy to
say that WPB delivers in that area, too.
You play the part of Stavros 'the Bulldog'
McGrogan, in the author's words "the hardest man the SAS ever
produced" though it soon becomes clear that that's a hell of an
understatement. The main character rarely has much of a personality in the more
puzzle focused games, usually serving as a mere cipher, but that's definitely
not the case here. The Bulldog alone contributes a hefty chunk of entertainment
value to an already entertaining game, and despite the brilliance of most of
the puzzles it just wouldn't be the same without him.
Oh, and there are lots and lots of those puzzles,
but thankfully they really ARE brilliant, that rare mix of challenging but fun.
Two of the things I dislike about puzzles in general is how just for the sake
of having puzzles, they're often crammed in where they don't belong and stick
out like a sore thumb, and how they can ruin your enjoyment of an otherwise
great game by forcing you to bang your head against a brick wall for hours and
hours, making not one iota of progress.
WPB circumvents both of those problems. First of
all, the plot is a simple one, mostly involving infiltrating a fortress, and all
of the puzzles feel like a natural part of infiltrating that fortress. Some are
fairly straightforward, some are more complicated, and ALL of them are fun. I
never once felt like Action A was just a tedious and unrelated chore to get to
Room B.
Secondly, David made some unique design decisions
that keeps players from running into the other problem I mentioned. It really
does seem like it would be difficult to get stuck, even for
'solution-challenged' people like myself, as just about every major puzzle has
an alternate solution, sometimes several, and you don't even need to solve
every one of them, as there is plenty of bonus material and multiple paths to
the end. (Though only the more difficult one may lead to the the optimal
ending, I still managed to accomplish two out of three of the main goals my
first time through, and only needed to consult the hints twice.)
Then, of course, there's the fact that many of the
'alternate solutions' might be as simple as bashing your way on through the
opposition. The Bulldog starts off with a certain number of 'life points',
which I know isn't a term generally associated with IF, but it works so well
here I wonder why more games don't use it. Every time you take the easy way out
and solve a puzzle with brawn instead of brains, there are painful (and usually
amusing) consequences for the Bulldog, which eat up a number of life points.
All life points gone = game over, but by making good use of the Undo command
(which can be accidentally disabled in the most hilariously cruel way ever,
though it's through a command I always try in the first room, so no big loss
there...) I never even came close to dying until the final confrontation at the
end.
Compared to the rest of the game the epilogue
seemed slightly weak, or at least disjointed, but it's not really an issue, and
the only reason I mention it is so that I can have SOMETHING in this review
that qualifies as criticism. Needless to say, I am eagerly awaiting the sequel.
AUTHOR: GRAHAM NELSON
PLATFORM: INFORM 7
REVIEWER: DAVID WHYLD