Ratings and Reviews by Audiart

I enjoyed the humorous yet mature writing style, and the titular character much more than the game itself. The only real puzzle is figuring out the solution to the crime, by interviewing all of the suspects. Ultimately the main character is so likable and funny that going through every dialogue option was buckets of fun. You will find yourself going "back" to check all of the options.

The character of Bell Park is one of the most well-developed teen characters I've ever seen in IF. Although in general I despise twine games, I think the format really worked for this game. It would have probably been less interesting as a short story, for example, because part of the fun was going through all of the different dialogue options.

I would recommend this game to people who don't like Twine format in general, because "Bell Park, Youth Detective" really plays more like a Choose Your Own Adventure book than the typical moody avant-gardism infesting the genre.

I found this game a lot denser than other Ned Yompus games. It is almost a sequel to Shuffling Around in format and gameplay. The main sequence is exploring the environment to figure out what the wordplay is, then adapting your command to that scene.

Ultimately I found the solutions increasingly illogical and farfetched and ended up resorting to the walkthrough constantly. Even while following the author's walkthrough directly, the solutions just stopped making any sense to me pretty early into the game.

Since Buck the Past has essentially no plot or character development, everything boils down to whether or not the wordplay makes sense and is funny. In most cases, the solutions are so unintuitive that it is hard to enjoy the more clever moments.

I enjoyed Shuffling Around quite a bit, but Buck the Past, while based with a good premise, was ultimately too untamed and illogical for me to complete.