Ratings and Reviews by Kake
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Interesting plotting, but unfair puzzles, November 25, 2008Related reviews: **, One-Room Game Competition 2008, Paolo Maroncelli, Alessandro Peretti
I had very high hopes for this one - the "packaging" looked smooth and polished, and despite a few typos in the scene-setting exposition, the quality of the writing initially seemed pretty good.
Unfortunately I couldn't solve a single one of the puzzles, and there were no in-game hints, either from an actual hint system or from responses to almost-right commands. I got through to the end by means of struggling for a while, peeping at the next few lines of the walkthrough, wondering how on earth anyone could possibly have come up with that solution unprompted, and then starting the cycle over again for the next puzzle.
After the first few go-rounds of this rather boring process, I lost all confidence that the remaining puzzles would be fair; the only thing that kept me going to the end was the thought that it would be unfair to give it a score before I'd finished it.
On the plus side, the plot's more interesting than the usual "get out of the room" one, and there's a definite sense of humour in some of the text (though it would really benefit from a going-over by a native speaker).
As a game, though, this completely failed for me.
Great potential let down by the implementation, November 25, 2008All you have to do, as the bumbling sidekick of the gorgeous, muscular Captain McBrawn, is find the World President and warn him of an impending attack - but before you can even get started, you're captured by the Screaming Communists and dumped into a locked, barred room high up in a tower in a mediaeval castle. Unsurprisingly, your task is to get out - though this task isn't actually as simple or as trite as it might sound.
It took me a little while to get started on this one, mainly because of "guess the verb" problems - and these problems persisted throughout the game, making it harder, more frustrating, and less fun than it really needed to be. A little fleshing-out of the rather sparse descriptions of some of the items might have helped too.
The hint system also broke down at one point, giving me the same hint over and over again for a problem that I'd already solved, so I eventually had to resort to the walkthrough.
I didn't really enjoy this game, and that's basically down to the implementation. The constant "you can't do that" stuff made it really frustrating to play - so frustrating that I don't want to play it again to find the optional bits that I missed. This is a real shame; it could be so much better. I do hope the author makes a second release that addresses these issues, since there's a good game in here struggling to get out.
Very little substance, November 25, 2008Bad Toast is essentially a puzzle game with a bolted-on and entirely irrelevant backstory. The title refers to a "toast" you made at a dinner party the night before - apparently your host took it the wrong way, since you've woken up in a dungeon.
Your task, obviously, is to escape. You do this by solving a single, very easy puzzle, and once you've done that the game essentially just stops. I gave it a second play-through, deliberately getting the puzzle solution wrong, and discovered that the solution is hardcoded (though it could have been randomised without too much trouble) and as soon as you make one wrong move the game is immediately over, so even if the puzzle was nontrivial you could solve it relatively quickly by trial and error alone.
There's pretty much no attempt to implement anything other than the five switches needed to solve the puzzle. There's very little of substance here at all, in fact. The best thing I can say about this game is that the spelling and grammar were mostly OK.
Great fun, and solidly implemented, December 30, 2007I really enjoyed this one. The hints are well-paced, the puzzles make sense, the implementation is sound, and there's lots to play around with.
The only bug I managed to find was a small one which produced a small amount of contradictory output, but it didn't spoil anything. The game did give me an unsolicited hint at one point, but that might have been because I'd just asked it for a few hints in succession, and to be honest I really did need it.
Would definitely recommend this game.
Randomness is not creativity, December 30, 2007This is the first Rybread game I've played; it seems to be the kind of thing that usually gets described as "unique" and "like being on drugs". But it isn't unique, really; it's just the same old kind of thing that tends to result from the misconception that random absurdity is the same thing as creativity.
It did start quite promisingly:
Womb with a view
This is a room. You feel very comfortable here. Its got lots of space. But you feel a need for something more, something to fulfill your life. You can go north.
>n
No you can't, I lied. Try west.
Now I thought that was funny — and there were a few other genuinely amusing moments in the game too, but a lot of it was just tedious. I found the "interview excerpts" particularly tedious; page-long infodumps with the tired premise of taking absurd things seriously.
(I do realise that this game is nearly a decade old as I write this, but I'm sure this kind of thing was pretty old even then.)
If you want to see "weird" done well, I'd recommend you try Deadline Enchanter instead.
A one-joke game, December 29, 2007I only played this because I'd heard you need to play it in order to enjoy Pick Up the Phone Booth and Aisle. It turns out you don't. If you like one-joke games, play this; if you don't, don't.
Not much to it, but it's funny enough, December 29, 2007Related reviews: David Dyte, Steve Bernard, Dan Shiovitz, Iain Merrick, Liza Daly, John Cater, Ola Sverre Bauge, J. Robinson Wheeler, Jon Blask, Dan Schmidt, Stephen Granade, Rob Noyes, Emily Short, ***
This game must have as many authors as it has unique responses (and I do wonder if that was the point?)
Anyway — it made me laugh a couple of times, and it didn't annoy me, and that's good enough for three stars in my book. I don't think you need to play Aisle first; but if you like this game, you'll definitely like Aisle.
A conversational game rather than a one-room game, December 23, 2007Urban Conflict situates you in a bombed-out building in the middle of a war. You've sustained a serious injury, and your only companion in the building is sitting opposite you in possession of an assault rifle — and definitely isn't on your side.
I didn't feel this was really a one-room game so much as a conversational game along the lines of (the obvious comparison) Galatea. I couldn't interact with anything in the room, and I couldn't figure out how to move around within it; I got as far as standing up and sitting down again, but I couldn't work out any way to move towards or away from the NPC.
I'm not a great fan of conversational games — I didn't particularly enjoy Galatea either — as they make me feel as though I'm expected to read the author's mind. I actually managed to spoil the power of this one's ending by stopping my line of questioning slightly too soon, moving on to other topics, and then accidentally triggering the ending somewhat incongruously.
It's worth playing, though, especially if you already know you like this kind of thing.
Far from perfect, but enjoyable enough, December 23, 2007The title kind of put me off this before I even started; it needs some punctuation, for one thing. The writing of the opening scene isn't great, either. Parts of it sound like bad goth poetry — "The fireplace is as empty as my heart" — and some of the descriptions are clumsy; why does the bed have "a blanket wrapped around it"?
The initial exposition ends strongly, though: "My remaining life can be measured in heartbeats. I must act!" This pulled me into the story and made me eager to get started.
And this game is worth playing. The story isn't particularly original, but the puzzles are reasonably fair and I did feel satisfaction when I finally managed to solve them all. It doesn't really have much replay value, but I quite enjoyed the two playthroughs that I needed to solve it. I would have preferred it if there had been some accommodation for alternative methods of solving the puzzles, even if it was just along the lines of letting me know why the object I was using was unsuitable (instead of just showing the default "you can't do that" response).
Having to type "story" to see the backstory was a bit odd. I'm still not sure if I liked that or not. The game is written from the first-person perspective, and the player character hasn't suffered any memory loss, so it seems odd that I-the-player have no idea what's going on at the start of the game — and it's entirely possible to play through the game without ever checking the backstory.
There is a turn limit, but it has a sensible justification (albeit one hidden in the backstory).
I'm not too keen on the way the game infers quite a lot from my commands; for example, if I type in "look at <thing>", I don't expect the game to have the PC start rummaging about in it.
One problem (which may be related to the above criticism) is that there are at least two items in the game that show me an interesting and useful description the first time I look at them, but on subsequent examination give me only "I see nothing that will help me", which is clearly untrue. So it's worth keeping a transcript that you can refer back to.
A fairly plotless series of logic puzzles, December 23, 2007This game really has no plot at all — it's basically just a series of rather unvaried logic puzzles, the kind of thing you find in IQ tests. The ending was a slight let-down; it basically just stopped, which is a shame, because there were some reasonably effective attempts at building up atmosphere as I progressed through the puzzles. I didn't not enjoy the game, but I found it rather unsatisfying.
Trial-and-error seems to have been guarded against; you have to have seen your clue before you can input the puzzle's answer. The answers are randomised, too, so you can't just get a cheat sheet and plug in the answers.
I got stuck on one of the later puzzles, and because the description of the object I'd been using to solve the earlier puzzles had changed to "You see nothing special about <thing>", I thought the next clue would be elsewhere in the room. This was, in fact, a bug (and one which has now been reported to the author). I managed to get through it, though, since "hint" told me to examine things that were in the now-nondescript object, and sure enough this was where my clue was.
Couple of typos/spelling mistakes, nothing major. The game also let me strip naked without comment.
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