Ratings and Reviews by OtisTDog

This short, very smooth little game by J. Robinson Wheeler is pretty well-developed for speed IF, and well worth the play time if you like irreverent takes on James Bond. It's not quite spoof, parody or satire, but it's definitely a comedy and a lot of fun.

I salute author J. Robinson Wheeler's ability to create such a fluid-feeling gameplay experience. Just about everything I tried was accepted and moved the action briskly along. The only place where I got stuck at all (for maybe a minute or two) was during a pseudo "boss battle" with the story's stylized femme fatale, who (fittingly) can't be handled like the string of mooks you have to wade through to reach that point.

Like all speed IF, this feels like it could have been more, but the work as it stands is complete and contains all of the essentials. Nothing is obviously missing that couldn't be considered to be filler, and leaving so much of what's non-essential to the player's imagination probably improves the subjective experience. I noted a couple of extremely minor bugs (Spoiler - click to show)(e.g. the chain securing the scientist you're out to save lingers in the room description even when dealt with), but these are excusable in a speed IF context.

If you're in an action-plus-comedy kind of mood, definitely consider firing this one up and giving it a spin. If you're not fully satisfied with the puzzleless format, then you might check out Centipede by the same author, which is similarly fluid and fast-paced but does have a puzzle to solve.

I don't know what possessed me to fire up this little pseudo-game by author Phil Riley, whose better-known works include The Bureau of Strange Happenings and the Galaxy Jones series.

This game is horrible, but know that this is a compliment, because it was produced for a competition in which being horrible was the goal. I found myself annoyed by the various (no doubt 100% intentional) shortcomings, but I had a good laugh after growing my first zapricot and (Spoiler - click to show)finding that eating it just leaves you in the position of having to grow another one, with an ever-present hunger timer waiting to kill off the PC should the player ever stop this infinite cycle.

After telling someone else about the game, I began to realize just how artfully I had been annoyed. The way that the Inform grammar lines have been defined for >DIG (and its converse) are quite funny in that it's actually a little difficult to get the parser to be so painful for the player in this particular way. It's a guess-the-syntax problem transmogrified into a genuine puzzle for someone familiar with the system. (Spoiler - click to show)(And I have to admit that I was stumped enough by the syntax for tamping that I had to resort to a decompiler. It was still delightful because I learned something new about the way the parser's "inference" logic works.)

Wherever the design looks like it might be unintentionally bad, Riley is careful to turn it up to 11 so that you know it's that way on purpose. (Spoiler - click to show)Yes, the descriptionless room named "path" north of the garden is funny. The fact that there are three more on the way to the well is very funny given the fairly tight hunger timer.

I doubt that very many people will share the perspective to really appreciate this convoluted (and involuted) joke of a game, but it's a great joke for those who do. I can't give it a very high score as a game, because -- to repeat -- it's a horrible game by design, but I can't give it a low score, either, out of admiration for the vision to reach such depths. I'll settle on 3 stars in recognition of the author having spotted and hit the target so precisely.