Reviews by AmberShards

Here's another entrant in the long line of games never betatested before release. How can I be that confident in such a statement? The first line has a typo. So does the third. Then there's the hyphenated soda-bottle, the run-on sentences, and missing capitalization. Things like this make me want to claw my eyes out, because it appears that the author couldn't bother to polish his prose, much less let anyone else play the game before unleashing it. It stinks of laziness.

Anyhow, the unnecessary tutorial appears out of nowhere, rewarding you without informing you what you're supposed to do, and then teleports in objects. At least it solves a bizarre puzzle which could otherwise only be explained by revealing that the PC had twisted and evil parents or that the PC had emotional issues.

The setup is a few notches better than "escape the room"; instead, it's "escape the house". You start off in your bedroom. The room descriptions are standard fare, with a bare minimum of atmosphere and occasionally wry insights. The detached cave-crawl perspective, however, tends to leave a lot of things up in the air. For instance, do you know the woman in the kitchen? Is she some stranger that just wandered in and started to make food? What about the girl in the living room, and why does she speak with a British accent? The perspective doesn't work in settings where you'd expect the PC to have some background knowledge. If Sara is his sister, why not just describe her initially as "your sister, Sara"? Such clues don't need to be paragraphs, but cluing in the player makes the game feel true to life.

The rest of the game is best described as an exercise in examining all objects and doing weird things with them. You're forced into this because purple prose is everywhere and because the game world makes no sense. Also, to compound the frustration, there aren't actually any inline hints.

Perhaps this game is winnable, but after 100 turns of increasing rage, I gave up. I have a suspicion that were I to succeed, though, the payoff would not be a sufficient recompense for my effort.

It's only the last puzzle that's not forgivable (more on that in a bit). The rest of the game is fine, and fairly solid for a first release. The cover art effectively sets the tone. The room descriptions aren't ornate, but they get the job done. Again, effective is probably the best way to characterize them. Even the concept that kicks off the game works.

However, there are problems: missing punctuation, forbidden actions, stock responses, parser problems, and a heck of a lot of loose ends. The forbidden actions are what got to me. You're trapped in a cabin, but you can't break the windows? You can't do violent things to vulnerable parts of doors? It just didn't make sense. Most people would do those things in such a situation and make their escape fairly quickly. That leads us to the huge, honking annoyance in the center of the room: the last puzzle.

The last puzzle is one of these intricate affairs that involves doing a lot of nonstandard things with a door. You're fought by the parser, whose responses (when they make sense) lead you to believe that you can't do what you end up needing to do. When you do those things, strangely, the effects are not mentioned in the room description. Fortunately, the game provides hints. Unless you have immense patience, you'll need them.

For a first time out, Safe is not bad. If the game were beta-tested, I have no doubt that the vast majority of these problems would have been corrected. In any case, I'm looking forward to more from this author.

Reading the description of the game, I wasn't sure if So Reality was trying to be cute, the author's native language wasn't English, or she got bored while making the game. I was hoping for "cute". I got "got bored while making the game".

The game itself uses the same style of writing (that is to say, run-on sentences galore), with bare-bones implementation, and a distressing lack of capitalization. It feels like a hand-me-down. Things don't fit, don't make sense, and are there just because they are.

The first puzzle (perhaps the only puzzle) involves (Spoiler - click to show)apparently a deaf-mute maid who "grabbs" you. I think the author meant for us to keep trying random verbs until we found one that worked, as neither you, the maid, nor the kitchen has any meaningful description.

So Reality proved to be neither witty enough nor enough of a train wreck to hold my interest.

Whenever I play a game that makes big-time typos (roll playing) and tells me I have scored more than it was possible to score, I know that I'm in for a bad time. Such is the case with Necron's Keep, another game in the long list of games that have never graced a beta-tester's fingertips.

Despite the typo, the game starts well, nearly very well. However, once the intro text is done, you're in a forest missing your sense of direction. That's not very realistic or very entertaining. In fact, it's straight out of the instadeath (TM) school of bad DMing. You remember those DMs, don't you? The sadists who took particular delight in killing off characters that took you months to level? Necron's Keep steals a few ideas from their campaigns.

But wait, there's combat, a true test of any role-playing game. This system seems to be based on the AD&D system, but Necron's Keep informs you of the Actual Die Rolls. Yes. When you attack, you get to read your to hit die roll, the monster's to hit die roll, and the die rolls for the damage! That just doesn't make for a good gaming experience, and decent DMs didn't tell the players about the mechanics anyways. They'd say something like, "The kobold is really staggering now, after your mace connected with his skull."

But that's not the only annoying thing about the combat system. There's the assumption that your character always attacks whatever baddies he finds, which means when you're wounded, you'll soon be dead. That's right. In Necron's Keep, a character with half of his hp gone automatically attacks anything he finds!

Then there other gameplay issues -- for example, not being able to use undo even though the option is provided when you die. When you pick up objects, the game tells you the room from which they were picked up; why that is necessary, I don't know. That along with combat might lead you to think that information overload rules the day. Not so. Most of the information provided is useless or annoying, yet the help is a threadbare affair. What's really happening is a kind of textual anorexia nervosa.

The descriptions are decent (except for one plagiarized from Zork), but the grammar is haphazard at best with typos, misused words, missing punctuation marring the experience. The points and what they do are obscure, the puzzles simple, and the combat, maddening.

All in all, Necron's Keep comes across as half-baked. I'm sure that the author can polish this, and I encourage him to do so; until then, there are just too many typos, bugs, and annoyances to make it worth your while.

It's true that this game is spartan and that default responses will greet most of your actions, but as I've played some truly bad games lately, I find the whisper of a plot and the lack of dying in six turns refreshing.

Housekey, Part I features three rooms of minimal implementation. Most items can be examined (the table, the bed, the rubbish), and the plot is linear and hand-holding. If you follow the game's clues, you can get the house key and get out in less than ten turns. The ending is quite the cliffhanger, which makes you wonder why there was no part 2. Part 2 was definitely planned, so what happened?

That said, there are some oddities. First, the title. At least in American English, house key is two words. The note is (Spoiler - click to show)in some language that I didn't recognize (German? Swiss?). The score and turn counters are combined, which is initially deceptive.

Is it worth playing? There's not enough there to justify the effort, but it's not bad.

I don't care much for games conducted in limited spaces; they almost always make me feel claustrophobic. There are exceptions to the rule -- Marika the Offering, for example, was masterful; Pick up the Phone Booth and Die was humorous; and there are others, but Dog/House is not one of them.

Here, there are two rooms, and only two rooms. That's limiting enough, but the sense of claustrophobia increases with the rejection messages that meet nearly every action. You can't go anywhere except outside, and you can't do anything with the principal items in the rooms. There is a help command, but it doesn't help much.

What you're supposed to do is left unclear; it seems that the game changed quite a bit from version 1 to 2. However, Dog/House does feature some interesting items (the autumn leaves) and some sharp writing that gives you a taste of atmosphere. If the author had developed the game more, it would have been truly engrossing.

The End & etc shows that the author has progressed a bit from the See Spot Run, "Mount car" level. The setup is familiar: an alien invasion, and of course, time is not on your side. You have seven turns to figure out what to do.

The End & etc gives us an intro, motivation, a plot, and a puzzle that makes you think a second or two. I couldn't win, but I did only try a handful of times. Unfortunately, the usual problems abound: no descriptions, a typo, Scary Caps, death in under 10 turns, and read-the-author's-mind-itis. A few beta-testers would have really helped here.

I salute the author for a much better outing than his previous efforts.

After reading the intro, I really have to wonder if the author has some sort of self-hate issues going on. Why release a game that shows no evidence of purpose or plot, and has no reason for existence? Is this the only way that he can garner attention, by creating worthless games and then plaguing us all with the source code?

The writing style is vague and distinctively careless. Here's an example (and no, this is not atypical): "You are here. You can see That Car there." Behold the masterful use of Scary Caps, as if the car was supremely important. But it, like everything -- literally -- in this game, has no detail, no response to EXAMINE, no reason for existence.

Nothing is ever explained. Why do you die in six turns? Why can you not drive a car, but only mount it? What does it mean to mount a car in the first place? I can only think that the author wrote this game in five minutes, probably while taking a dump. There's certainly zero evidence of beta-testing.

You can win the game; you can lose the game. However, none of the endings have any emotional impact as they are just the default responses. So in the end, you play a game that brings no sense of achievement, no pleasure in winning, no sorrow in losing, a pointless game that exists for no reason.

In a single word, why?

If this game was actually playable, I have no doubt that it would be excellent, if the uneasy and atmospheric writing in the first two rooms was characteristic. Unfortunately, the first two rooms are all you will ever see in this game. You can never return to the chapel once you leave it. "Exit" works, but "enter" does not. No directions lead anywhere. You cannot affect the door; you cannot take the path, and there is nowhere else to go. It's not a matter of time, either, as waiting produces no results. Purple prose is everywhere, so there's nothing you can do with the world around you. I'm surprised by this, more than anything. Was Room 206 even finished?

Ordinarily I would eat up a game with dark humor and savor all the odd and eerie elisions that it gave me, but not so, here. I think the first strike is the main character; simply, she doesn't arouse any sympathy or empathy in my chest. She has several character flaws that work against her -- toilet-mouth, sexually loose, rather shallow.

The diary is strike two. If it was well-done, the game could be effective (as a tragedy), but if not, it would mark the long grey march to the end. I was looking forward to a fascinating inner life, one haunted by despair and a clutching for hope, but it came off pedestrian and flat. What the main character has experienced just doesn't seem sufficient to motivate her to commit suicide. The soaring highs, the crashing lows, the sense of oppression from which suicide seems to proffer the only hope -- these are not present. Perhaps that is a backhanded way of demonstrating the needlessness of suicide, but the lack of empathy could just as easily become another brick in the wall. "See? Even people who write games about it don't really understand it!" quoth the overwrought teen.

As for game play, there are very few bugs. The only one I found was where the narrator slipped into first person when second person had been used all along. The game distinguishes sensibly between vague options (such as "turn on water"). You can do most things that you'd expect to be able to. The only exceptions involved water, which is notoriously difficult to deal with, but if you're going to have a tub, I think that you've accepted the challenges of water. To make it purple prose is a cop-out.

The writing style is a bit rough, and it often uses hyphens in the place of semicolons or periods. A bit more polishing is in order.

Finally, the whole razon d'etre of the game is contradictory -- strike three. The help traces the evolution of the game and the author's purpose. After I read that, I thought, "Ok, I can see why he did it." However, not all endings have a postscript as described in the help. Thus, the entire stated reason of the game (to show the effects of suicide) is negated. Was that slapped on to salve the author's conscience? It's a bait-and-switch scenario.

If you're going to make a game like this, it should be better-rounded, simply due to the sensitive subject nature. As it stands, it encourages you to keep playing to see how many different endings you can discover; the different endings of course are different manners in which you attempt suicide. Suicide, despite the author's stated intentions, glorifies suicide.