Ratings and Reviews by Ghalev

When the game tells us, without irony, that "this panty contains nothing edible," we can be sure of two things. First, this isn't AIF. Second, this is a game badly in need of some friendly beta-testers. And it isn't just about spelling. This is a game where things like this happen ...

The Spider eyes you warily.

>examine the spider
You can't see any such thing.

... Several things like this. It is, functionally, an unfinished work. Some of the writing seems fun; the basic old-school nature of it feels very nice (I like a bit of retro-adaptation!) and in every way it feels like the first beta of a game with a bright future ahead, given a few rounds of testing and the requisite elbow-grease. There's a real sense of simple fun bubbling somewhere in there. Author: time to recruit some friends, and don't worry: you haven't (at least not yet) written a bad game; it's just that your potentially good game isn't done yet.

I like easy puzzles … the kind where you poke at them a bit, feel confused for about fifteen seconds, remember to examine something obvious, and go aha! – then move along to the next one. Every puzzle in Pirate’s Plunder is exactly like that, and that makes me a happy little buccaneer. If you’re seeking challenging lateral thinking, Loot Island is not your vacation destination this year.

Pirate’s Plunder has character … arguably, a few-dozen ye’s, thars and harr’s too much character. Despite my sincere childish love of things cheesy and piratical (and this glass house I’m standing in, with rock in hand), I admit the game gave me a fight-or-flight response with the first few paragraphs. I decided to stick with it, and was rewarded … after awhile, I absorbed the intense barrage of faux-nautical lingo, and it felt just fine.

There are a few issues that make the game feel unpolished. Descriptions never seem to change, even when I’ve taken specific and game-meaningful action to change the thing described, resulting in some moments of confusion. The game’s determination to help the player along is similarly immune to the passage of time and event, and helpful suggestions to do something you’ve already done are pretty common. I also ran afoul of one colossal (though not actually game-breaking) bug, which led me to worry for a bit that I’d need to start over: (Spoiler - click to show)you must deal with an old nemesis, "summoned" by digging where X marks the spot ... but even once you've gotten rid of him, you can seem to summon him right back again if you repeat the DIG command - and the game won't let you get rid of him again! Eek.

But such niggles feel all niggly, because the bottom line is that Pirate’s Plunder feels a lot like a near-perfect little morsel of IF … just the right number of barriers for a quick (but not trivial) game, all of which feel appropriate to the setting and genre … piratey fun and silliness all over, and a playful willingness to bend heaven and earth to celebrate a ship’s boat full of requisite cliches. This brief game delivers pretty much exactly what it says on the tin, with a hearty “harr” and a joyous refusal to take itself seriously.

Note: This review is of the Gargoyle version, which the ReadMe implies may have some small differences from the main one.

Sand-Dancer is a good game with strong atmosphere, a well-characterized protagonist, lots of guidance for the player, and a story well worth the modest investment in time and effort the game demands. It also sports some genuine replay value, and almost demands that you take advantage of that. On the flip side, Sand-Dancer is marred by some awkward writing issues, basic implementation shortcomings, guess-the-verb, guess-the-noun and even guess-the-preposition problems, a sometimes overwhelmingly overt linearity, and pockmarked by the occasional proofing mishap.

It's the kind of game that's difficult to review because while its problems are many, my goal is to celebrate it and affirm the good bits, because most of the bad bits are easily fixable distractions, lesser parts of the worthy whole. Compounding the problem is this: most of the bits I want to celebrate are spoilers, and not the kind of spoilers I'm even comfortable tucking away behind a spoiler tag ... because I do feel this game is worth playing, I don't want to tempt anyone to shortcut its delights. But with that sincere praise on the record, I'm also here to warn you about some of the speedbumps that lay ahead.

The game setting is, in many ways, minimally implemented. A large number of the nouns offer a single stock non-description. I like that, for the most part ... it provides a crystal-clear focus on exactly which nouns are important to the character (not to be confused, in this case, with importance to the "puzzles" in play). But there are some places where the world model underperforms in frustrating ways. To pick one simple non-spoiler example: I'm here in the desert with my damaged pickup truck, but the pickup truck doesn't have a bed. I don't mean the game gently refuses to bother with the bed; I mean it's just not there, even as a minimally implemented noun. This would be only mildly jarring in some games, but here it's compounded by a host of other guess-the-noun issues with missing common synonyms, so when I'm alarmed to find that my pickup truck has no bed to look into, I feel obliged to make sure it's really not there, and to do that I have to bang my head against the parser wall a few more times, to make certain it isn't just hiding behind a synonym I've overlooked.

Nouns aren't the only culprits. I have a lighter, but I can't FLICK it ... but if I SWITCH LIGHTER ON, the first thing it tells me is that I've flicked it. At one point in the game I can (Spoiler - click to show)lift a sheet of metal ... except it doesn't understand LIFT (but when I finally TAKE it instead, I'm told explicitly that I've lifted it). To solve one of the earlier easy puzzles, I need to (Spoiler - click to show)throw something through a window ... except I can't throw something THROUGH a window or INTO a window, I must throw something AT a window, and other phrasings provide no re-direction; they leave me wondering if I've got the solution wrong (even though, as it happens, I don't). Minor issues like these are, individually, dismissable, but Sand-Dancer is dusted with them from start to finish, and it drags the experience like grit in the gears.

The game is linear (or at least, guided along very finite paths) in an overt way. The key character choices are so clearly marked (and in most cases, their consequences so clearly telegraphed) that, structurally, I'm comfortable considering the game a choose-your-own-adventure with bonus interactive cut-scenes. As a fan of CYOA for any game that explores really divergent story possibilities, I don't intend that as a slur, but it undermines the sense of interaction when, at times, you're given a "choice" of exactly one thing to do, and the game grinds to a halt until you do what you're told. This happened to me several times during the course of play, and it left me wondering why the game simply didn't presume the action instead of forcing me to "interact" by typing in the only allowable command. Other games, for example, also characterize with (Spoiler - click to show)triggered memories ... but in other games that rely on the same device, the memories just happen. Here, the game prods me to ask for them, and won't advance correctly until I obediently comply. Maybe that's meant to be a helpful blend of "guided" and "interactive," but there's a line between leading by the hand and leading by the nose. This game lives nowhere in sight of that line.

My biggest problem with the game is also my most subjective problem with it, so grains of salt all around, please. The writing is, for the most part, very able ... the game's authors (I'm unsure of who wrote and/or coded which bits) achieve some very effective atmosphere without resorting to bloated prose, and I can't thank any writers enough for that ... but the game makes attempts at colloquialism in a way that fails spectacularly, resulting only in that embarrassed awkwardness you get when an elderly person makes an attempt to sound 25, in that hey-kids-I'm-hip-to-your-crazy-lingo way. The parser is a smartass, which would be more palatable if it weren't so frequently (and outrageously) a dumbass ... and when on top of that it's referring to me as "holmes" and "bro" and "dawg" and "gangsta" (no, really) with all the authenticity of George W. Bush in baggy shorts making a gang sign, it's just ... it's just embarrassing. All this to emphasize that my regular-guy protagonist (the one with the grease-monkey job and the pickup truck without a bed ... who also happens to think of the world around him in flowery poetics) is just a dawg who SWITCHES HIS LIGHTER ON, holmes, that's just ... no. In these matters, the game fails not only totally, but pitiably.

But it's a good game. Smarten it up, tighten it up, ease it of its insecure pretenses and give it more backbone, and it'd be a very good game verging on great. Play Sand-Dancer, because it has qualities seldom seen and some genuinely sharp ideas, well-executed and well-implemented. Play it to be inspired to do better, perhaps. Play it for the imagery. Play it because it's fun. But don't expect a completely polished and satisfying experience, at least not until a later release.

[Review based on Release 1; some of the technical concerns (forwarded to the authors in greater detail) have already been addressed in the first days of the game's existence! Groovy.]