Ratings and Reviews by OtisTDog

If you are a completionist who happens to encounter this game, then you will find the title to be 100% accurate: The end is your escape from this muddled, nonsensical mess.

I agree with Paul O'Brien that it is "rather disconcerting to be thrown into this environment without even a halfhearted explanation about what was happening," but unlike O'Brien I never found The End Means Escape to become absorbing. The first fifty moves generated only hostility from the talking objects in the first puzzle, after which came my first use of >HINT and then a brute force "exploration" of oodles of combinatorial unproductive responses.

After working out that it's possible to (Spoiler - click to show)>UNLOCK DOOR WITH SCISSORS (which seems to accomplish nothing), I looked back over the various responses and tried (Spoiler - click to show)>BALLOON, RUB FLOOR. All well and good, and then I got the balloon to pick up another object. Then another fifty moves without progress, at which point >HINT tells me that I need to... do exactly what I've just done (which had no effect). And won't give any further hints until I do that. I don't know whether the issue is a consequence of the context sensitivity of the built-in hints or a bug in the program logic, or both. The only solution I found was a restart.

Several reviewers cite this first scenario as the game's high point. Should you somehow plow through it, your reward is another completely ungrounded scenario, this one featuring moving words around. This is an interesting mechanic, but here, devoid of useful context, it is reduced to a mere tech demo. You can try to "solve" this, if you like, but my suggestion is to just use the walkthrough.

Past this, we get to even weirder interactions with dead bodies of a type one reviewer (Danielle) called "creepy" and another (Tina Sikorski) deemed "icky." Enticing, huh? Even the walkthrough notes: "Ewww...That was gross."

Next: a maze with an unusual solution but not one I enjoyed. And finally, a metaphor for... who can say for sure? Fortunately, this last segment is quick enough even without hints.

There appears to be no raison d'etre for this work -- it's just a pile of detail implementation utterly lacking in story or any other observable coherence. As Adam Cadre summarizes it: "... goal, please?" One reviewer suggests that the unifying feature is that "each [tableau] has as its basis understanding or at least discovering the nature of something," but that's a core basic of puzzle-oriented interactive fiction, not something novel to this work.

A smart person that I talked to about this game noted: "Surrealism isn't a pass to make no sense and then pretend it's more meaningful." Other reviewers delicately dance around the point, but I will not: When not actively repugnant, this piece is at best a waste of time.

The End Means Escape is clearly the product of a lot of genuine effort on the part of the author, and it just barely manages to claw its way out of one-star territory (i.e. "no redeeming qualities") by virtue of a few mechanical parts worth a closer look for their effect on mood and tone. However, don't expect to enjoy this one even if you choose to study it, and my advice to pure players is to steer clear.

The blurb for Bill Belichick Offseason Simulator claims:

Any fun you may have, or amusement you may find, while piloting this simulator is purely accidental, and should be reported as a software bug.

If that is to be taken seriously, then I am sorry to report to the author that this work is riddled with bugs.

It seems certain, however, that this tongue-in-cheek warning is not to be taken seriously. BBOS is a short-form absurdist comedy that can't even take itself seriously as a lampooning of Bill Belichick, who at the time was head coach of the New England Patriots. "Serious" is not a word that applies to this endeavor.

I know nothing about the Patriots or Mr. Belichick's career as a football coach. Author Jon Bois is a sports writer of some note about whose career and work I'm similarly ignorant. Knowledge of these things is almost completely unrelated to enjoying this game, which draws the bulk of its tropes from text adventures, adventure games, RPGs and popular fiction, all of which are blended together in a base of pure author id.

There is a slight unifying framework to this game that involves collecting cards in order to design the perfect offensive play. It's pretty incidental to the play experience, which is more about having fun with a series of pixel-animated vignettes featuring everything from an encounter with a "roving rock music gang" to a visit to a hardware megastore to being summoned to another dimension by a wizard to interrogating an NFL player about favorite music and recipes.

BBOS is a great choice for a lunchtime or commute "snack" game (though you may need to make use of its bookmark feature to complete it across more than one session), or as light entertainment for a rainy afternoon. If you're on the fence about this one, give it a shot -- if the first five minutes amuse you, you can expect to enjoy the rest.

This game is a remarkable achievement, full of cleverly devious (or deviously clever?) little puzzles that are suitable for both kids and grown-ups. The fact that it's written in a custom system that seems every bit as full-featured as any of the major parser systems (like Inform 7, TADS or Dialog) is just icing on the cake.

The simple premise of an apprentice's fetch quest in a land of sweets really undersells the difficulty level of this game. I tried it by myself and never got more than 12 out of 16. When I suggested it to my play group, everyone was quickly hooked by the game's central premise of a decomposable/recombinable set of magical wordlets and had a blast working out all of the ways that they could be exploited.

The fact that there is no checklist of items to gather means that finding all sixteen will require some lateral thinking; part of the puzzle structure is figuring out what things might be convertible into the special ingredients that you've been sent to find. The very British-style approach to descriptions of locations and items means that, though the information provided is sparse, almost every bit of it is relevant in some way or another.

My playgroup was able to obtain all 16 points in the course of a two-hour session, with only a few nudges from me based on previous experience. In a few places there are hints of guess-the-verb in that one must intuit that a particular action can be applied to objects, but with multiple people playing it was never very long before one of us came up with the right idea. The biggest headslapper from my perspective was discovery of two magical ingredients (both flans) in an unexpected location -- it's a bit of a joke on experienced players, but the game was quite fair about this in its hinting. (Spoiler - click to show)In the cottage, there's a remark about desk drawers that you shouldn't forget!

This is a great game for introducing newcomers to parser IF, and well worth the time for anyone looking for some fun with a neat magic system remniscent of Suveh Nux. My hat is off to author Nils Fagerburg, whose impressive talents are on display here.

(The title of the review comes from the game itself. I couldn't resist.)

Raising the Flag on Mount Yo Momma is from 2010, but its core design sensibilities come from an earlier era. Author Juhana Leinonen maintains the overall feeling of a very old-school game but wraps it up in a fun and reasonably user-friendly package.

I think it's the feel of the NPCs that hearkens farthest back. For a game released in 2010, they are positively atavistic: serving largely as obstacles and treated by the PC as an inferior class of being instead of as fellow travelers in the game world. Scott Bruner notes in a contemporary SPAG review (linked on the game's page): "The characters aren’t one dimensional so much as they’re actually caricatures." This is true, but it is almost certainly intentional.

The game's comedy is almost purely of the bad-things-happen-to-people style. That's phrasing things a bit passively, since you are generally the one doing these bad things -- and when you're not doing them directly, you're certainly setting them into motion. At least one caricature (a "lounge lizard" type) is skillfully portrayed, such that the typical player is probably glad to see the straw man take a beating.

Although the design is "merciful" on the Zarfian scale, there is a smidgen of unintentional cruelty due to it being possible to get the game into a permanent loss state. (Spoiler - click to show)(At least, it seemed that way to me. It's possible to use the gum on the jukebox twice, and the second time the associated NP will be stuck trying to fix it forever. He also won't let you fix it. That means the music can never be changed, which is necessary in order to retrieve something from under the speaker.)

I was a bit disappointed that the actual showdowns on the stage were low on interactivity, since the setup seemed to promise that they would be the center of the action. Instead on a mechanical basis this game is a typical light puzzler in which overcoming obstacles off-stage allows the PC to do better when on-stage.

The presence of at least one game-breaking bug makes this one veer toward two-star territory, but since the average player probably won't run into it and the overall gameplay is pretty smooth, Raising remains safely in "good" territory via competent execution of a conventional design using an uncommon type of setting.