Reviews by J. J. Guest

I enjoyed this short vignette in which you play a man who needs to get dressed before answering the door to some trick-or-treaters. The player character is well characterised despite the brevity of the piece. He's middle-aged and a little finicky and he seems (Spoiler - click to show)to take a ghoulish delight in wearing the clothes of a dead man. This is one of those games that didn't make a huge impression on me when I first played it, yet I found myself still thinking about it a few hours later. It sort of gets under your skin.

It took slightly less than two minutes to finish this game, and I can only imagine it took the author a similar length of time to write it! Having said that, it is a funny idea, and the clue is right there in the title!

This is a very simple, one-room Adventuron game with a single puzzle. You have decide what clothes to wash in order to flush a ghost out of a washing machine. The washing machine is in a graveyard and the clues as to which clothes to wash are on a trio of gravestones.

This premise raises all sorts of questions. Never mind about why washing clothes of a particular colour (and not just any old colour) would draw a ghost out of a washing machine; the question foremost in my mind is, how do you operate a washing machine in a graveyard? Presumably there are water pipes and electrical cables trailing all the way back to your house.

Once I'd worked out what the game expected of me, it became a matter of working out the clues on the gravestones and washing the right three items. Some reviewers got it right away, but I found the last of the three clues (on the marble gravestone) rather ambiguous and it took me eight goes to beat the game. Depending on your interpretation, I think there are at least six right answers to that final clue.

Anyway, it was fun and silly.

Sparks Fly begins with a nightmarish scenario, you're all alone in your car which has broken down in a remote area. Your only hope is a strange man who comes to your aid, but right from the off, there's something off about him.

He turns out to be a horrible predator, who lives with his almost-as-horrible grandmother. What follows is a kidnap and escape scenario with a nonconsensual body modification aspect. There are, apparently, four endings (of which I found two).

After reading another review, I was expecting a mechanical body-horror game in the vein of Cyberqueen, but Sparks Fly doesn't go nearly that far. There's minimal gore and the body-modification aspect is implied rather than graphically described. As such it almost feels unnecessary. The chief antagonist is creepy enough as it is, and the complicit grandmother somehow makes the situation worse.

Presentation is excellent, with well-chosen music and images. There's an element of character customisation - you can change your character's name, hair colour and gender, but it doesn't appear to have any bearing on the game.

Structurally, Sparks Fly is quite linear, with all of the important choices coming right at the end. Having found (I think) the best and worst endings, I felt as though I had done it justice. It's a worthy first effort, and I look forward to seeing what this author produces next!

Beneath the Weeping Willow is a short, sweet ghost story in which you play the ghost. It's written in Ink, using a tasteful and well designed custom interface. It's the "open map" type of choice-based game, in which the player is free to move back and forth between rooms much as they can in a parser game.

The player character is a ghost who has a limited time to alert the new owners of her house to her presence and guide them towards discovering her fate. Being incorporeal, this is not as easy as it sounds. I must have the right instincts, though, because I solved the game on my first go!

I enjoyed this game despite it only taking me a few minutes to complete. It's well written, though I feel the descriptions could be more atmospheric. I noticed one typo (a repeated word, in the letter). The presentation is excellent, including one innovation I hadn't seen before: the page refreshes each time you make a choice, but there's also a history option which shows you the whole text of the game so far.

This is one of the best Adventuron games I've played, from the author of last year's The Faeries of Haelstowne, which I also enjoyed. The first thing that struck me was the writing, which has the charming, well-mannered humour of British children's classics such as the Paddington Bear and Professor Branestawm books. It feels like it belongs to an earlier, simpler era, without the snark and endless pop culture references that characterise a lot of modern comedy. I'm not sure if the game was written with children in mind, but it's one I wouldn't hesitate to play with my young nephews, and I'm sure they'd enjoy it. That said, I don't think they'd solve it alone.

The game has a large map, and the central conceit is that you're playing two characters you can switch between. The two dogs have slightly different abilities and some tasks can only be completed by both dogs acting together. I was reminded a little of the old ZX Spectrum arcade adventure Head Over Heels. The pair get themselves into lots of amusing situations, but much of the comedy comes from the dog's-eye view of humans going about their daily lives. It is wry and very well-observed.

There are a lot of puzzles, some of which are very clever, such as (Spoiler - click to show)untangling Custard from the lamp post. Others are rather less than intuitive, and I often found myself turning to the excellent hint system. It's not always obvious what you're supposed to be doing, and I sometimes had to use the hints to give me a push in the right direction. Often the thing I was supposed to be doing was something I'd never have thought of, since it had no obvious connection to the main objective. In more than one way, the game reminded me of Untitled Goose Game, which has a checklist of things the goose (or geese) can try, and I came to rely on the hint system in much the same way, using it to steer me through the game. I don't think I'd have solved it otherwise. Once I'd accepted the necessity of using the hints, it didn't spoil my enjoyment a bit.

Implementation is very smooth and I encountered very few problems with my playthrough. It felt as though the author had provided plenty of synonyms and that the game had been thoroughly beta-tested. The Adventuron style of clearing the screen every time you move to a new room was a bit of a nuisance, because I couldn't scroll back and refer to past events, but it never became a major issue. If I had one, minor gripe with the game as a whole, it would be that (Spoiler - click to show)the river is too wide, crossing it became a bit tedious especially since I had to make several trips.

Despite these criticisms, Custard & Mustard's Big Adventure is beautifully written, very funny and a lot of fun to play. The highest compliment I can pay this game is that I didn't want to stop playing. I kept coming back to it even when I had much more urgent things to do. Highly recommended.

This is a short lecture on the merits of eating insects, written as if delivered by an annoyingly self-righteous person who has cornered you in the kitchen at a party. Good choices are rewarded with success, bad choices with sarcasm and snark. Nevertheless it does deliver some genuine laughs along with its environmental messages, and is wise enough not to outstay its welcome. Eat bugs, everyone! They're good for you and good for the planet.

When I read the title of this game I assumed that the word "filthy" was meant in the sense of "sexually offensive". Surely everyone has an elderly relative who delights in making lewd jokes in polite company! But this isn't the case at all, the titular aunt is filthy in the sense of unwashed, as are most of her strange family. This is a somewhat rambling and digressive work that reminded me a little of the early Steve Aylett novel, Bigot Hall. It's written in an autobiographical style peppered with excerpts from newspaper articles, screenplays and letters, and tells the tale of the Bladesmiths, a monied English family living in a large country house. The Bladesmiths are a horrible lot, feared by their neighbours and not averse to murdering each other if it would be to their advantage. There's not much in the way of interactivity, but the surreal humour of the piece kept me clicking through. The authenticity of the English setting is undermined here and there by Americanisms, but they're things you probably wouldn't notice unless you happened to be British. Overall I enjoyed my delve into the strange world of the Bladesmiths, and I look forward to seeing what the author comes up with next.

The Magpie Takes the Train was written for me, as my chosen prize for winning IFComp 2018, and what a prize it turned out to be! I definitely made the right choice. It is a sequel to my competition game, Alias 'The Magpie', and stars the same player-character, the sauve, irreverent and somewhat audacious gentleman thief Sir Rodney Playfair, otherwise known as the 'Magpie'.

This delightful almost-one-room game centres around a second heist for the eponymous jewel thief. This time he's after the Gavinchian Rose, a valuable ruby brooch. Rushworth captures the Magpie to a tee. The dialogue is wittily hilarious, the puzzles are clever, logical and well clued, and the characters are as disreputable a bunch of blisters as you could care to meet. There's the haughty and overbearing Cornelia Hogg, her talkative parrot Horus, her waspish personal attendant Beatrice Foxtrot, and the Marquis, who, well, to say any more would be to give the game away, so to speak! Much fun is to be had from interacting with the characters whilst adopting various guises.

The game's features include an innovative, inventory-based conversation system and a bunch of amusing Easter eggs. There's a tonne of fun to be had from trying silly things and you can even try your hand at mixing drinks - with somewhat questionable results!

The Magpie Takes the Train is everything I could have hoped for in an authorised sequel. It's a lovely tribute to Alias 'The Magpie', a smashing game in its own right and a wonderful bit of fun!

I first encountered Return of the Diamond in a book called "Games and other programs for the Acorn Electron", published by Penguin Books.

The game is very simple, with just nine locations. It does, however, contain all the basics of a simple parser game. There is a light source puzzle, basic combat and an inventory limit. It can be quite frustrating to play, and despite its size, it took me two or three tries to beat it.

Return of the Diamond is significant for me as it was the first example I found of how a text adventure could be coded. It became the basis of all the games I would write in BBC Basic, and in time I learned to expand the two-word parser into four, and make many other improvements. I would find better examples in time, mostly in the pages of Electron User magazine, but this was the game that got me into programming and writing IF.