Reviews by PDearmore

Not bad for what it is... A quick little text adventure in which you play the part of a programmer coming in to work over the weekend to fix a horrible bug in your program code. The game is not without its frustrations--such as having to punch in a code to unlock a door every time you go through it. Most of the solutions make sense, or are at least easy enough to figure out. One thing that tripped me up for a while is that being in the same room as an object that you need to use is not necessarily the same thing as carrying the object. Shouldn't take more than a half hour or so, from start to finish.

Looks like somebody got a ray tracing program and was looking for a way to get some use out of it. Graphics involve the typical mirrored spheres and other geometrical shapes, along with some others--perhaps digitized photos. Not all of them are this cheesy, there is some well done stuff in here. Actually, though, the graphics get a little annoying past a certain point and hinder the game by breaking it up with lengthy load-time waits.

It looks like the plot is you are going back in time to rescue a murder suspect that is searching for the existence of God. You follow him back in time and end up encountering... Not much really. A forest, a cave, a waterfall, a dinosaur. After a few times of being eaten, and having to go through the intro with all of the slow-loading graphics, I called this one. Being that it is an "introductory adventure" meant to entice you to purchase the full version, I have a feeling I'm not missing too much. Still, it's not totally unworthy of a quick play-through.
CardinalSin.jpg

As a minor point of interest, this may be the first game in the post-Infocom era to not have a response to 'xyzzy'.

Described as "ideal for a complete beginner providing they
examine everything" in the Readme. The puzzles are of the "look at x, find y, use it on z" variety.

This is really not bad for a game developed from scratch in Assembly. Yeah, I don't like that the "unknown input" message and the "item has no description message" are the same, and there are a few other minor flaws like this, but not bad, considering.

The game captures the spirit of the pre-Infocom text adventures very well--but it does feel updated somewhat. No mazes, and I wasn't dying without warning at every turn. I ended up with a score of 72--not sure what the max is. I suspect there is something you can do with the fungus to increase your score, but I'm not sure what it is. Anyway, I reached the conclusion of the game, so I'm happy. Also, just for the heck of it, I ran a few of the other .COM files in DOSBox--a fun little addition to the game. This one is worth checking out if you have a few minutes free some day.