Reviews by Lumin

I'm not sure if Ba'Roo! is Hensman's first game, or first full length game, or what, but either way it's a lot of fun, and doubly impressive if the above is true. There is a very old school vibe about it right from the start, and over the course of the adventure you will get to explore an expansive cave system, assemble a macguffin, say WTF at the plot a few times if you think about it too hard, and shoot an anachronism in the face. (...to be honest I'm not sure if that last one's necessarily an integral part of the whole 80's thing but it was still a defining moment for me.)

Not to say that there weren't a few issues though, even if I did enjoy the game as a whole. I encountered a fairly major bug and an annoying decision by the author in the first room (being a jerk to the player may be a staple of retro IF but my love for that particular aspect of the genre only goes so far), and later had some GTV problems, as well as a poorly-clued puzzle that completely derailed me for awhile. (At one point you're told to find a suit, but not given any information whatsoever about where or how, and the otherwise fairly talkative NPC has nothing to say on the matter. After a fruitless search I finally became convinced I needed a key to access a certain area first, but that turned out to be misleading as well...)

I wouldn't consider any of those complaints to be actually game-breaking however, because in the end I still enjoyed the experience and was able to play through without assistance (though apparently I missed a few things, for instance the meaning of the title..), though after talking to a couple of other players it may be that I lucked out and had a smoother ride through than average. It turns out Ba'Roo! actually contains multiple paths (REAL multiple paths, not just multiple endings where you type undo a couple of times to see them all), which I thought was pretty ambitious. Whether the author got TOO ambitious at the expense of solid gameplay I can't say until I get a chance to personally check out the other paths, I think it's impressive in its own right that he made the attempt, and hopefully any bugs can be cleaned up in a post-comp release.

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