Ratings and Reviews by Robin Johnson

Very well written, atmospheric short story about a weird ritual and a harrowing underworld. It gives the impression of having been made specifically for Ryan Veeder (which was the brief of the RV Expo, after all) but, as someone who is not Ryan Veeder, I enjoyed it too.

If you like cheese and puns, you will like this game. It is a series of fairly simple puzzles involving (some rather contrived) cheese homonyms. Just missing a few classics - for example, you have Mascarpone, but you don't get the chance to hide a horse behind it.

Even for a Scott Adams game, unwarned deathtraps and unwinnable states crop up almost everywhere in this game. Most new players will die within a few moves by picking up an item and having their throat slit by a jealous merchant (with no indication that the item even belonged to the merchant.) Still it has some fun to it - Adams' trick of making the familiarity of the setting and the sparsity of the prose work together - and a nice early example of a pilotable vehicle, the sailing ship.

At the beginning of this game, I didn't know what was going on at all. Having completed it, I'm still not sure. And somehow, this is the coolest thing about it. You learn bits and pieces as you go along: for the first few moves, all you understand is that you're in danger and you have to hide, then when you explore a little, you come to understand where your enemy is and that you have to attack it, then - when the main NPC gets involved - the nature of the enemy becomes clearer, and so on. I very much got the feeling that my understanding as the player was progressing at the same rate as the player character's (characters'?) - including the fact that I still don't understand exactly what the PC is (are?) (a swarm of microbes? A planetary consciousness? Pratchett-esque Small Gods? Nature itself?) This is made all the better by the fact that the game never tries to spell out the answers to these things.

One of the first things I did when I realised that the PC could move through solid objects was to see what happened if I kept going DOWN - I was pleased to see that the mantle, core, and far side of the planet were all implemented. Details like this make me happy.

This is the best of the Adams adventures, and worth playing to see what can be done under extremely constrained writing and programming conditions. The fact that the setting and characters are hackneyed actually works in its favour combined with the ultra-tersed descriptions: if you spend three paragraphs describing an eye-patched, hook-handed, wooden-legged scurvy buccaneer, you're just indulging in cliche, but if all you have space for is "You're on a desert island. There is a pirate here", the fact that those things already exist in full colour in the player's mind makes it a much more vivid experience.