Reviews by Blake

WARNING: Some very mild spoilers throughout.

This one didn’t do it for me. It has some great imagery, and the authors clearly loved making the game. I liked the psychic slant, though it felt more like an extra examine command or hint system in practice. The background story has some promise as well. As a full package, however, it’s not as much fun as it should be.

First off, the authors give themselves a pat on the back as they inform us that the game is full of “stuff". I don’t mind a bit of glib smugness, but it has to be earned. If you’re going to make a claim like that, your game ought to be filled to the brim with items, locations, people to talk to. It better not be an empty medical facility with a large number of one-note rooms, a small number of items, and a story told almost entirely via notes and flashbacks. The implementation is standard too. I was expecting tons of things to examine and sub-examine (and sub-examine). But there’s just a few things per room and very rarely do you get an interesting reaction. Very little show, a ton of tell. The Dreamhold this is not.

The writing is very good, though a bit dry in the less exciting sections. I love the vibe here, a mix of Carpenter and Cronenberg, with a little bit of Verhoven sprinkled on top. Body horror and gore, presented with a wink and a nudge (the washing machine in the basement functioning as a large intestine is ingenious). The descriptions of your psychic abilities are also handled nicely, and the flashbacks are remarkably effective in their design. We have some scary scenes, some entertaining descriptions, and some fun ways to die. Though it is odd how there are a few instances where the PC refuses to kill themself, when most of the time they happily traipse into death with a simple >w. I would have preferred a bit more proofreading. Twice are rooms with a flickering light described as “cinematic". What a mimesis-shattering adjective, one that also doubles, again, as telling in the face of perfectly good showing. Never again, please. Even worse, an exit is left out of one the room descriptions. Being forced to open the walkthrough to see that glaring error made me very unhappy.

There are multiple endings, nine in total, and extra puzzles to solve to obtain them. This may count as “stuff" but it doesn’t do much to entice me, as I’ve never like having to replay a game, or even just parts of a game, just to see a different ending. Usually, there’s only one good one, and its tedious to have to try the others while searching for it. I don’t mind extra endings as a bonus, like in the aforementioned Dreamhold, or as a few simple forks right at the end that I can save and retry. But in general, I prefer one ending, one challenge. The tedium, the sense of running in place that I get when going back after seeing The End on my screen… it’s so unpleasant. This is very much a personal preference, so I don’t hold it against the authors or let it factor much into my rating.

The puzzles are mostly perfunctory, though the optional ones require a bit more brainpower. Overall I was just bored. Waiting in the elevator, going through obvious action after obvious action, going to the next obvious point. The beauty of the text adventure is its ability to engage the player by allowing them to become someone else, to think and act and feel in a strange environment, or in a stranger’s shoes. When what you’re doing is this straightforward, you lose engagement. Again, the extra puzzles mitigated this, but having to veer off the beaten path just to have something interesting to do is a problem. I recently reviewed an older game that also had fairly simple tasks; Noah, for the Spectrum. That difference is that in that game, you had a more compact area, open-ended design (no locked doors or items you have to wait to get), and less tedium. I also consider the standards of the time. In 2010, you can make puzzles that are far more sophisticated, with more moving parts and NPCs. This isn’t a CYOA game. It’s you wandering around a big, empty facility, discovering fragments of a story. Take a page from Silent Hill, not Slender. You’ve created a surreal hellscape, give me some hard puzzles, a way to interact with it that's more complex than pushing one button or collecting a page. Give me some psychic skills, some psychokinesis maybe. Put a real stumper in, make me work for that good ending. I just want a bit more.

I know I’ve been harsh, but I don’t want to hurt anyone's feelings here. This game did have stuff I liked, mostly the writing, which is a very important part of interactive fiction. The game design is just bland when compared to the prose. I’m sure that this game would be great for a novice player. As a more experienced adventurer, I just found it kind of dull. A 2.5 that I'll round up to a 3.

Here’s a true obscurity, a Quill game written by one man, with no publisher, probably moving very few copies. I went in expecting very little, (and fearing an early Jarod's Journey) only to be pleasantly surprised. This is a well-designed piece that humanizes Noah, and tells his story without ever dipping into Sunday School farce or Hollywood apocrypha. It's a tale we all know of course, but it's about the journey, not the destination.

What a fun journey it is! While technically in the Cruel category, it's not an unfair or difficult game. Sure, you will restore a few times due to death, and there are two beginner's traps that can make your game unwinnable early on, (Spoiler - click to show)(missing the key and cutting down the wrong trees too early) but they're not abundant and you can usually tell where you went wrong. It helps to know the story, as the game has you act out every key moment, and it assumes you have that knowledge for at least one scene; namely the olive branch. There is a well-written introduction though, and praying to God in the beginning reveals His plan, giving even someone unfamiliar with Scripture the info they need.

The gameplay is solid, mostly consisting of preparing for the Flood. These are actions that are obvious, but still fun. People forget that text adventures don't have to be slogs, running the player through an interminable gauntlet of brainteasers. There is pleasure to be found in the mundane. Think of all the happiness people have felt maintaining gardens and digging mines in a game like Minecraft. I enjoyed buying supplies, preparing food, finding drinking water, building the ark. The writing is solid. It’s a serious game, but it’s never stoic, stiff, or preachy. Noah’s piousness and care for the animals that God has created comes through, as you move about the Ark and feed each one. Just like when preparing for the Flood, it becomes quite meditative. Though you do need to be careful who gets what food item; there’s just enough for everybody, and some animals will only accept one kind. It’s pretty easy to figure out who gets what. Just be attentive.

It’s a shame that religious games are so often made just to proselytize. This title shows that you can make an approachable, enjoyable game with religious subject matter. For those who fear that I am writing this out of bias, I will disclose that I am an agnostic, though I don't think being Christian would discredit someone from writing objectively on a Christian game. (Not many folks out there singing the praises of Bible Games.)

All in all, I really enjoyed Noah, and have no real complaints. The author went on to write one more game six years later, a text-with-graphics adventure based on The Plagues of Egypt. I can only hope that it maintains the same level of quality seen here.

The first two Ket games were uneven but fun adventures, full of creative puzzles and charming imagery, two parts of a zany quest, leavened with a bit of Grimm macabre. This game has none of that. It is a soulless, clearly rushed, completely unsolvable bit of cynicism designed to stand between the aspiring contest winner and their prize. One might have hoped that after the tough but fair design of the second game, the third would be even better. Nope. All pretense of fun is thrown out the window as you stare blankly at the text-based companion to Hareraiser.

The problems are numerous. I will try my best to cover all of them. Hmm, let's see, where to begin...

Well, we have a new parser. It sucks. It's very slow and no longer lists exits, for no good reason. It's lacking in color as well. Were they trying to save space? This game doesn't appear to be much larger than the last. Who can tell?

The puzzles are atrocious. Not at first, actually. I got about a quarter of the way through, but after (Spoiler - click to show)zig-zagging to get the giant to break the trapdoor, it all goes to hell in a handbasket. You can only rarely examine anything and get a response. That was true of the last two games, and many other older titles, as well. But you could intuit and deduce item function in those; they took place in an actual world, and the items were used in ways that were plausible, at least most of the time. Here, every item has to be used in some completely illogical, non-intuitive, improbable, and highly-specific context. There are riddles to solve: you will never solve them. Even if you do, figuring out how to communicate the solutions is impossible.

It's absurd, honestly. Some of these could work in a modern game, with more opportunities to examine and experiment. Here, in this limited parser, you're expected to just look at the pieces and see how they would logically fit. That's fine in a game with a internally consistent world. That's how the Scott Adams puzzles worked. It's how they had to work, due to limited space. Here, though, we're doomed, because the author has also sacrificed the writing.

Yes indeed, the writing here is awful. This is a nightmare, and not just in the gameplay sense. It also has the messy, incoherent nature of a bad dream. None of the chunks of world you progress through fit together. This isn't supposed to be Alice in Wonderland, it's meant to be fairy tale fantasy. I've seen this surreal, looking-glass style done well, of course, but here, not only does it fail to match the style of the previous games, it's also written with no punch, no imagination. It's so rote, and the series of key punches you make to slog through it have no connection. The game fails to mention exits so often that you're forced to map a blind maze everywhere you go. It'll say you're in a passage going north and south, but then you go west and boom, there's a room. Vital information is just missing. This is not a finished, tested product.

Trying to get a perfect score is futile. There's so many ways to cheat yourself out of points, one of which is saving. Yup. The game will add further sabotage when you save. And in what is already a buggy game full of instant deaths, cheap hits, (speaking of hits, the combat is all but gone too) and unwinnable situations, that's the cherry on top. It shows you exactly how contemptuous (and contemptible) this whole project is. Why put in the work for the first two entries if for the third, the eponymous final mission, you plan on just throwing together an unsolvable middle finger of a program? What is the point? To avoid giving away the prize? I wonder who won. They earned it, that's for sure.

Even from an historical perspective, this is a truly wretched game, and a squandering of what could have been. I like hard games; that's why I play a lot of older titles. But they have to be fair, be solvable. What I don't like are unfair games, games full of impossible tasks. This all this tape has to offer, and it doesn't even have decent prose to offer as compensation. This is the worst commercial adventure game, of any era, that I've ever seen.

The contest continues in Temple of Vran. The first Ket game mixed reasonable, tidy puzzles with a few impossible actions, intent on making sure sales could peak before people started achieving 100% solutions and assembling the final code. The second game dispenses with this; I'd argue that this game is solvable, front to back, without a hint or a walkthrough. I only needed a few prods here and there to keep moving.

Now it's still not easy, mind you. There is death, items you can waste, mistakes you can make that will render your game unwinnable. But they're fewer and farther between now, and we have no more stalling tactics. Instead, we have a slight upgrade in combat - we can now switch weapons to deal more handily with certain foes. There's far less retreading of the same ground - the game is a bit shorter but covers more area than the cramped dungeon of the first game. More locations, more items, more surprises. These are not always simple interactions, either. We get spatial relationships, one plausible location, some color-matching, and a few Scott Adams pure-logic stumpers. All of them are doable.

The amount of text and the quality of the writing are also improved, and quite funny, as well, both in description and interaction. This is an oldie worth taking another look at. The only real problem is that the follow-up, The Final Mission, is horrible, a truly abysmal game. I say play this one, and imagine how you would like the story to end. You'll save time and tears.

Despite its status as a contest game, and its age, this is a perfectly playable game. You're robbed of an examine command for all but your items, but most of what you have to do can be deduced. The key word being most. There are a few completely impossible puzzles in here, thrown in purely to slow progress on the contest. Whether some dedicated geek got through without waiting for a magazine hint is anyone's guess. Fortunately, the other puzzles are easy to intuit and fun to play around with. You'll know when you've run into a brick wall. Peek at a walkthrough and continue on your way.

Of course, you can die left and right, or end up in an unwinnable situation. Combat, step and die traps, missing items, missed information... it's all here in its early 80's glory. But you likely know what you're getting into. This game packs personality into its small bites (or should I say bytes?) of text, and can be fun for those who don't mind a game that hits the hard end of the Cruel ranking. A fun bonus: you can carry over your stats into the second game in the trilogy, which is a marked improvement over this one.

I love digging through the archives of 8-bit computer text adventures. There were so many released, due to the widespread availability of user-friendly adventure game engines (such as the one used by this game, The Quill), that you can find yourself in some truly undiscovered territory; games that haven't been played hardly ever since their initial release. Of course, being the era it was, a number of these game can be very difficult, and there may not be much in the way of hints. You also need to hunt down the manual if you want the backstory for most of the games, which is usually essential. But, if you're willing to be brave, you can have a lot of fun.

Which brings us to The Crystal Frog, an oddly-titled, old-fashioned treasure hunt. The story is as simple as can be; there's a valuable artifact called - you guessed it - The Crystal Frog. Go and get it. That's it.

How you go about getting it is the fun part. The game has a vaguely creepy, surreal atmosphere, as move through a series of disconnected environments, solving puzzles and avoiding death. This is very traditional, echoing back to the original Adventure in several resounding notes. You encounter creatures and places from a variety of sources - fairy tales, classic literature, horror, all described laconically and eerily. No one wants to talk to you - NPCs exist to be given what they want, and then vanish. You move between areas like Alice in Wonderland, the world changing with the disquieting suddenness of a dream. Several of the deaths you can experience are quite creepy indeed. All of this seems very intentional, and is a welcome change from the impartial blandness or jovial self-awareness found in other treasure hunt games. Much credit to the author, David Brown, here.

In addition to the titular frog, there are several optional puzzles you can solve for additional points, and your score is given as a percentage, making it easy to gauge your progress. You can die, sometimes without warning, and there's at least one timed puzzle, so save often. The game is small enough that it never becomes an issue, and knowing that death might be around every corner contributes to the game's suspenseful atmosphere.

So, this all sounds pretty good, right? No, it's not very ambitious, and no, it doesn't do anything that new, but it's a game in the classic Adventure/Adventureland style done right - something many try, but not too many pull off (how many games have you played that claim to be "like Scott Adams", and fall so short of fun? Too many for me!). So why the middling rating?

Well, there's a bugged room containing vital information right near the end that makes the game unwinnable, (Spoiler - click to show)(a code you need to open the final door is in a room that, when you enter, makes said final door unopenable. Sadly, a score bonus, for killing a vampire, is hidden there, so you can't get 100%) and prevents you from getting a perfect score. Only way to get past it is to look it up in a walkthrough first, or save in the right spot, go on until you get the information, and then restore back to that point to proceed. It's not quite game-killing, but it does take the wind out of your sails, or at least it did for me. I hate when you can't solve a puzzle legitimately, and I hate not being able to score the full 100%. Some might say that gameplay-wise, it's not that different from learning by dying, but at least that's intended, and you know what happened. Knowing that this was just a mistake, and that you could be wandering around forever before you figure it out (like I did), that just doesn't sit right with yours truly.

Either way, now you know to look out for it, and you can click the very mild spoiler in the last paragraph for a hint on exactly what room it is that triggers the bug. The rest of the game is worth playing, though, and it makes for an enjoyable evening of spooky exploring.

A surreal and atmospheric game that manages to be genuinely scary, through a combination of strong prose, unnerving sound design, and creative use of the parser. Easily one of the best Quest games, playing to the engine's strengths and cleanly side-stepping its limitations.

The game tells a dark, tragic story. The author has a knack for coming up with very uncomfortable, unsettling imagery that combines mechanical and non-organic form with autonomy and flesh. They do a great job in integrating your actions into the scene at hand, too, forcing you to get up close and personal with your twisted surrounding. You're never just an observer, and this becomes a vital part of the story. The story itself is not told directly, but pieced together handily, and is left open enough in the right areas so as to allow for multiple endings, all of which are worth seeing. It's easy to tell where in the game the paths branch too, so replaying to see them all isn't too difficult. Just be sure to save fairly often.

The only real issues are a lack of proofreading (quite a few misspellings and grammatical errors), and low verb implementation - "use" is your main verb throughout most of the game, resulting in the game being quite easy. I was able to solve it with no hints and little trouble. I think some other people who have mentioned that they found the game hard may not be fully aware of just how much of each room you can examine. Part of the issue is the engine itself. Quest lists the "level 1" items and points of interest, if you will, the obvious ones, in the "Places and Objects" and "Items" boxes, but not the deeper, "level 2" objects, that are listed only in the room description.

A non-spoiler example: You are in a room. You can see a chest and a flowerpot. Both are listed in the Places and Objects box. They are "level 1" items. If you examine the chest, you find that it's unlocked. You open it, and there's a ruby inside. You examine the flowerpot, and you see a lump in the soil. You examine the soil, and you find a buried key. Neither the ruby, the soil, or the key will show up in that Places and Objects box. They are "level 2", and can only be interacted with the conventional way.

A spoilery, specific example from the game: (Spoiler - click to show)one of the hallways has holes in the wall. While not listed in the Places and Objects box, you can examine and find a journal that offers a critical clue in solving the janitor's closet riddle puzzle.

Because of this ambiguity, and because the author writes the game properly, so that everything is mentioned in the room description, I recommend closing that Places and Objects box and just playing based on the text, just like you would in a normal parser. You avoid a lot of confusion. That goes for any Quest game, really. Some of the bad ones will NOT list items in the room description, opting to include them only in the box, but the games that do this are usually rife with so many additional problems so as to render them not worth playing anyway.

Quest rant aside, do play this game. I've avoided spoilers, so turn off the lights, turn up the sound, and experience the game for yourself. Just remember to examine everything (the game does recognize proper shorthand, so just an "x" will do), and remember that the vocabulary is limited, and you should have no problems solving the game and enjoying one of the scariest IF titles out there.

Revision: I also wanted to add that this game must be played in the Quest client. Playing online causes issues with the multimedia, and the game will crash and fail to load audio properly. The Quest client also makes it much easier to browse other games authored in the engine, and is necessary for any game utilizing sound, so playing online is usually best avoided anyway. Cheers!

Playing as The Hulk in a text adventure should be a lot of fun, liberating the player from the usual weakness of early IF protagonists, who often complain that they can't do this, that or the other, usually in regard to matters of physical strength. Sadly, this game, the first in the unfinished Questprobe series, makes little use of the main character's powers. You die in absurd ways, floundering through a very small area filled with annoyingly difficult, often unfair puzzles. The next adventure, starring Spider-Man, fared much better, but this one is a skip.

This is not a traditional text adventure, in any sense. It consists, basically, of you going about, solving puzzles, as (Spoiler - click to show)the parser itself starts to reveal how much it hates you. Trust me when I say that while that idea sounds stupid on paper, it's executed well and works fine.

Gameplay wise, this isn't too fancy. You have a few simple puzzles before the game starts revealing the twist. Then there's a very annoying section where you have to (Spoiler - click to show)guess a number between 1 and 10,000. Solvable, but tedious. Especially with the computer spouting the same three insults over and over again. It works with the game's theme, but it isn't really that fun. I guess it's not supposed to be.

Overall, there isn't much gameplay here, but as an experimental subversion of your typical text adventure, it's fine.

I went into this expecting it to be piece of tasteless crap. However, it wasn't even that. There's nothing to do in this "game". Literally. There's not a single command that the game responds to, with the exception of "examine me", which just gets the response, "Looking good". Doesn't help you much.

You start out passed out on the couch, but there's nowhere to go, nothing to interact with, no one to talk to, nothing. I tried every command I could think of. I tried going every direction. I examined everything in sight. No response for any of it.

Another review on the Quest website said that this might be a case of the author doing a test upload. As stupid as that is, if that is indeed the explanation, I think a less lurid title would have worked.

Or maybe the author wrote a full game and something went wrong in the upload process. Maybe the author accidentally uploaded an earlier version of the game and hasn't checked the comments saying that the game is unfinished. Maybe it's been created for overly analytical types like myself to hypothesize about, so the author can have a laugh as we grasp at straws. Who knows?

All I can do is state the obvious, and say, "Avoid this."