Ratings and Reviews by jakomo

A simple Enchanter-like magic casting adventure on an empty desert island (or dessert island, as this is a place of gingerbread cottages, cream lakes and battenburg mountains). Uses a custom parser system that works well, and presents a nice map on the right on the screen (that fills as you explore) with rich text on the left. Provides a little world-building through letters and newspaper articles scattered around. If you're not Dutch/Flemish you'll need to look up what a "smoutebol" is. A lot of fun, unfortunately it lacks any online hints, and it's pretty damn hard to boot so I didn't get very far by myself (7/16 points). On the itch.io page you can find "Slacker Sam's guide to an easy B" - but it still only gets you up to 9/16 points.

I loved this. Like a Saturday morning kid's cartoon scored to the sound of lo-fi space-pop, CC's Road to Stardom is adorable, delightful, silly and disposable. Wander around a little spaceship vibing with your quirky buddies (including a youtuber pigeon), playing through little logic puzzles and word games. Nothing too taxing, just enough to keep you buzzing off the game's brilliant style and mood. Fab comic-book style pixel art graphics and a superb musical score accompany the fun: even a full song with vocals. It's part of "Cosmoose", a multi-media multi-format Gorillaz-like pop music project fronted by cartoon characters (I'm listening to Cosmoose's album Into the Cosmooverse as I write this, in fact - it rules!). CC's Road to Stardom is the 21st century answer to Tass Times in Tonetown.

Straightforward vampire-hunting adventure: doesn't intend to surprise or subvert the traditional gothic horror formula, beyond some nods to the term "strigoi" and an attempt to ground it in traditional Romanian mythology. It's thoroughly implemented and the puzzles are well-designed. The only baffling choice is the arbitrary inventory limit, requiring lots of dropping and picking up stuff which gets annoying real fast. It could also have done with implementing "hand" and "finger" as nouns. It's an enhanced translation of an older Spanish game and it uses the PunyInform library, so some of its limitations are understandable. Worth a play.

Absolutely nails the objective of the Text Adventure Literacy Jam: to make an enjoyable easy game for text adventure first-timers. This would be the Day One exercise in Text Adventures 101 if such a thing existed. You're a troll in a world of fairy-tale mythological creatures, trying to raise a dragon (literally) by the book. The set-up could have been cloying and twee, but the author has lots of sly fun inverting expectations: the cyclops is friendly, the fairy is angry, the unicorn is unruly. The ASCII art images are pleasant (the troll's house looks like cross-stitched embroidery). It's a kids game at heart but still requires some thought and lateral thinking to get through, even for adults. Everything just works!