Ratings and Reviews by jakomo

In the very first location, the word "wooden" is highlighted in red. Normally you would highlight interactable nouns, not adjectives, so I was already off-kilter. Heading down into some tunnels below the shack, the word "hole" is in blue and "smelly mud" is in red. This time, you can interact with the mud, so that confirms the "wooden" highlight is a bug? The game is very inconsistent throughout in its use of red and blue highlights, which is a big problem for a game with such a thin implementation. It needs a ton of additional verb-synonyms and noun-synonyms to be implemented before it's even close to playable: even then, there is zero story to speak of, and the graphics are straight-up bad: why is a mole drawn as a stick-man?

An entry in the Text Adventure Literacy Jam, a competition for entry-level parser games for kids. Reflections goes out of its way to hold a first-timers hand: simple, bold and colourful images for each location, short MIDI-musical ditties at appropriate moments, a helpful tutorial mode, and a map on-screen at all times (alongside the competition-mandated two word parser).

You're a kid wandering around the house and the back-garden looking for the titular reflections of yourself. A light sprinkling of magical realism adds talking cats and magic mirrors to the mix. Puzzles are suitably basic: mix a recipe, find out a dog's name, distract a rat, play with coloured crystals. All well-clued in the environment if you explore thoroughly.

Would feel perfectly at home on a 1983 primary school's BBC microcomputer, alongside Granny's Garden and Devil's Causeway.

An Android adaptation of the Lone Wolf "New Order" subseries (books 21-32): if you're looking for books 1-20, Lone Wolf Saga is what you need. Lone Wolf New Order currently covers books 21-29: book 30 (Dead in the Deep) is still available for sale in paper format and not covered by the Project Aon licence. Dever died in 2016, so the future of unpublished books 31-32 is unknown.

You play as a new protagonist, a student of the original Lone Wolf who sends you out on missions around Magnamund to fight evil. The app is not quite as polished/bug-free as Lone Wolf Saga but still works great, a must-download for anyone who wants to see further adventures after completing the original Lone Wolf's story arc.

Tiny Twine scifi-horror: well-written, with very effective descriptions of the 'kills'. The twist in the tale has been done before, 20 years ago in fact, but remains pretty effective in 2020.

Unlike Taylor, the fun protagonist you talk to and advise in Lifeline, Silent Night, and Halfway to Infinity, Wynn in Flatline is an annoying and whiny nuisance. Complaining, ignoring your choices, and, taking minutes to perform the simplest of actions (opening a door?). The story does expand the Lifeline universe in an interesting way, answers some lingering questions from Taylor's games, and the heart-rate monitor is a neat new mechanic, but it's still a bit of slog to get through.

One part of the game requires you to access an external website to get some codes: that website is now shut down. You can now get the codes from https://pearsoncorp.green/ or https://twitter.com/Lifeline_Server/status/1076294978190622721