Ratings and Reviews by archcorenth

Well, I thought the game was fantastic. I started on it somewhat doubtfully. I played a Mystery Science Theater 3000 text adventure based on the game, Detective, on this site earlier and thought it was hilarious and went about looking for more. The second Mystery Science Theater game lampooned a game called Stiffy Makane and that brought me to this.

I wasn't sure I was going to play this for more than five minutes when I started out. The business with references and footnotes felt very awkward and none of them were very interesting, but when I stumbled upon Julia and talk about her nose, I knew I had to play the entire game simply because I read Latin per se illustrata by Orberg. I just love the kinds of things this game lampoons and I like that having sex with characters isn't the reward for completing a puzzle. Most characters just want to have sex with you. Isn't that a better fantasy than in things like Leisure Suit Larry?

I will say that the best material in the game is frontloaded. I quite liked traveling around the Roman world and interacting with celebrities. The section in Judea was actually my favorite--and frankly the false ending there is actually the best ending. After you acquire the banana things slow down a bit. Hell wasn't very interesting to me which was disappointing even though I suppose that bit had the best puzzles. Maybe it's because it was inspired by the Wasteland which I read in school but made no impression on me. Then the Vergil section simply felt unnecessary and not very much interesting happened in it, although I suppose the duck was fun (despite the fact that I've never read Henry Miller so I didn't catch that reference at all, but I guess I put two and two together...?) But then I forgave the game slowing down in those parts because the end was fantastic again, one of the best endings of all games.

So, yeah, I think this is easily one of the best text adventures I've played. Well worth it's high rating. Strong story, lots of jokes, a couple of passages like the one with the barbarian are even passably erotic.

I mostly played this because I enjoyed A Taste of Terror, which was also translated in to English by the same person. This game, on the other hand, is not very good. It is quite small and all of the set pieces are scenes the author liked from Raiders of the Lost Ark and all the puzzles are solved the way the characters in the movie solved the same puzzles. There no real NPC's in the game, which is disappointing. The two you do meet you can't really interact with. And most dreadful of all is that there is a maze with loops that you must solve almost immediately upon setting out. Why I'm giving this two instead of one star is partly because I appreciate that effort that went into preserving the game and partly because with the likes of Detective and Stiffy McKane out there, there is just so much farther to fall. The game works. You can make your way through it. But you'd better off just rewatching the Indiana Jones movies.

This was hilarious. So happy to have discovered this in 2026 thirty years after it was made. I could hear the Mystery Science Theater robot's voices in my head when I read their lines. It was all very authentic. I wonder if anyone has ever made a map of this game.

This is a pretty bad game, and I'm guessing that's because it's one of the first attempts at a game by the designer.

I'd give it 1-star for the plot, which isn't so much as mentioned until the very end of the game, where it is delivered in a bunch of uninteractive exposition. But it ekes out two stars because the bar scene in the first half of the game which is lively and humorous, with eye-rolling dialogue. I particularly like that you are kind of left on your own during it without being pushed in one direction or the other. I think if the bar had been filled up with more to do and that had been the entire game, this could have been a 4-star game.

But eventually you go home, are optionally given a fairly uninteresting sex scene/dream sequence and then find yourself in another sort of text adventure entirely in which you mush just get from A to B and in which there is only a single puzzle and it's really bad. it's the sort you'd expect in something like a lucas arts or discworld game.

But this designer definitely improves. I'm mostly reviewing this because I liked his later games and wanted to play the rest of them.

I really enjoyed this game mostly for the characters and dialogue. Robb Sherwin is has a really great edgy sense of humor that reminds me of--perhaps--Elmore Leonard dialogue. The plot of the game was a bit iffier because it didn't totally explain what was going on. Even at the end of the game, I never learned why the girl had been kidnapped.

But I also really like the style of the game. Most early text adventures give you a starting scenario and then have you explore a vast playground where you solve puzzles--and maybe there's a bit more plot at the very end of the game.

This game has story all the way through and exploration areas are limited to just a few rooms at a time. I think this way uses the game format to its best advantage as an interactive story.

I fully intend to play more games by Sherwin (I've played two others before) and to find out what Mike Sousa's games are like to. :)