Ratings and Reviews by AmberShards

I have to admit that I didn't expect much from an adaption of a Stephen King work. The Mist, however, underwhelmed even those expectations.

The writing is over-the-top, cartoonish horror as you might have already expected given the source. A tentacled mist is sucking people out of a store. Ooh, scary! Important words are IN ALL CAPS, and of course you have stabs at Christianity. Yes, there's a crazy old lady and her mindless followers looking for blood. Wow, how original!

The parser's responses are cloying. Typing things it doesn't understand either produces pats on the head, displays a thought from the PC, or speeches from any NPCs around. The effect is disconcerting, as you're not sure if what you see is a response to your actions or the game ignoring your actions. In addition, each turn spits out an annoying set of dashes, as though you wouldn't be able to tell the response from your command without help. Worse, the parser requires you to confirm your responses to opening doors. These responses don't indicate that something awful is going to happen, oh no. They're just there to pat you on the head, yet again.

The NPCs exist just to move from place to place like unchanging pieces on a chessboard. Talking to them rarely produces useful information, and they don't respond to changes in their environment. (Spoiler - click to show)To see what I mean, go into the meat locker and wait for an NPC to show up.

While the parser isn't at all bad, especially given the era of the game, the plot more than makes up for it. You're required to do things that just don't make sense to advance the plot. (Spoiler - click to show)If I just saw a guy get sucked into the mist, what's the most logical thing to do? Follow him? Of course not, but that's what you have to do to get out of the supermarket. And random death awaits you wherever you go. I guess the idea is not to stay in one place too long, or to bother talking to anyone, because if you do, it's game over. Even that technique -- keeping the player on the run -- could have worked, had you a chance to escape once a bug shows up. But you don't, and the concept of being killed by dragonflies, bees, and two-feet-long bugs isn't horrific, just silly. That aside, you'll also need to map (could this game get any more annoying?) but not just because the game is large -- because it's filled with tons of empty rooms. But that's what The Mist is about, apparently: nonsensical actions, empty rooms, and silly deaths.

Finally, saving the game, at least using DOSBox, is not possible. Perhaps you need a better emulator or a DOS machine.

All things considered, The Mist is stunningly awful. It's worth noting that no-one is willing to claim authorship for this game. That makes sense, though. I suppose if I had cobbled together something this poor, I wouldn't want to affix my name (or even a pseudonym) to it either.

Of course, given that most Speed IF entries suck more a black hole, the hurdle for good Speed IF is ridiculously low. All you have to do is finish your game and you're in. You are a Chef not only surmounts that apparently difficult hurdle, but actually succeeds in being enjoyable to play and funny, to boot. The humor here is wild-eyed breathless zaniness. The difficulty is very easy, and the time it takes to win is a few minutes, tops. The ending is nothing spectacular, but the fun is all in the breathless over-the-top style and the running gag. It's definitely worth a few minutes of time. Bravo, Dan Shiovitz.

The name of the game contains much truth; unfortunately, "The Terrible, Old Manse" begins with a grammar error in the title itself and the problems don't let up from there. The room descriptions are littered with typos, some resulting in unintentional comedy (or pornography). Take for example, the Pantry. Guess what's misspelled? The name of the room itself! Even a main object in the game suffers from this bone-headed mistake -- the lantern, or should I say, the LATERN. Yup, you'll have to refer to the LATERN the entire game because TTOM doesn't recognize the word LANTERN.

For additional weariness, objects don't behave the way that you'd expect. (Spoiler - click to show)You can open the arras, for instance, and you open it by going east from the first room. Simply getting the key causes doors to unlock, while dropping it does nothing. What kind of house is this? The NPCs actions' are similarly implemented, particularly in the case of the bat. TTOM states that the bat harries you, but your movement is unrestricted and no additional time is taken up from its interference unless you are waiting. (Spoiler - click to show)Also, the bat can age you just by touching you. Huh? This, however, doesn't prevent you from getting the bat and carrying it around. Finally, the game imposes a severe time limit and a three-item carrying limit.

As for writing style, TTOM drowns in minimalistic descriptions, with room after room of terse "This is" and "There are" sentences. Its atmosphere is MIA with the few standard horror cliches not even raising the game to the level of self-parody. Purple prose is everywhere.

If the game is winnable, it must rely upon examining every object to discover which ones are purple prose and which are not. I gave up long before resorting to that exercise in frustration.

It becomes painfully obvious that this game wasn't tested by anyone besides the author, and I seriously wonder if the author himself bothered to test his own game. Didn't even a simple comparison with any other IF game tell the author that something was off?

The Terrible Old Manse is fairly terrible, even for a first-time outing.

An Informal Time is as the author himself described it in the game's header; though why someone would want to release such a work is beyond me. Maybe this is a new marketing campaign: lack of testing = surreal! Frankly, AIT gives surrealism a bad name.

That sounds harsh, I realize, but AIT consists of ancient adventure-game cliches and parser infatuation masquerading as profound insight. (Spoiler - click to show)No, being inside the compass is not novel, although it could have been if you could do anything with or in it! It's not surreal, just spartan and old hat.

There's no score, nothing surprising or insightful, but there are bugs. You'll find that items don't work (despite their description and the room description) and that doing common actions will lead you to cryptic error messages, such as the name of this review. However, you will be amazed -- at the paucity of testing that this game received. Why was this game not tested? This is the author's fourth work. What happened?

One star. This "game" is waste of everyone's time -- including the author's.

The Empty Room begins with a contradiction; if the room is empty, how are you in it? Who you are is described in such a way to whet your appetite, but the meal never comes. That, unfortunately, is symbolic of the entire game. Many times TER whets your appetite with interesting descriptions, samples of high-tech (and low-tech), but there's no follow-through. There is no greater resonance.

Instead, what you have is a game that successfully encourages you to keep playing by gradually revealing changes in your environment. It's very linear, but this is one of a few games where the linearity works. Even after having played and won, I'm still not clear on what I just did, so while it's engaging, and challenging, it's not terribly clear. I suspect this is another part of the bare-bones mentality that never bothered with the answering why you are in the room, why you are dressed like that, and all the other big questions that will bother you while you're playing.

With all that said, the implementation is a bit, shall I say, odd. If there is something on the floor, for instance, the room description will not tell you that. Oh no. You have the examine the floor. The same thing goes with complex objects that you discover. You have to examine sides, walls, ad nauseum. The same thing goes when you do something. The game will not always inform you of the results, so it's back to examining things. This often places you in a somewhat frustrating and tedious cycle of "Do X. Examine Y." Now all of this would absolutely sink this game IF the puzzles were hard. Fortunately they are not, and so you can make progress quickly.

When you do win, the ending itself is probably the greatest let down since winning 1942, or the "endings" of Twin Peaks and The Blair Witch Project. There is a momentary elision of joy, but nothing is explained.

TER deserves three stars, because it can be won, it is challenging without being frustrating, and despite its linearity and its one-room nature (arguably), I played it to the end, and I managed to win.

And yes, the help system? Avoid it if you can.

I remember playing this whenever my family would visit my mom's friend, way, way back in the day (yes, that's two "ways", so you know this was just a few years after dinosaurs ruled the earth). I never associated this with Scott Adams, so I was really surprised when I redownloaded it recently, wondering if This Game was That Game. Why didn't Scott Adams come to mind, you might be wondering? Adventureland left an awful taste in my mouth with its tons of ways to die and epic death phrases such as "Bees sting you." Pirate Adventure, however, was much more fair, and had atmosphere, something I appreciated at a visceral level even back then. The puzzles ranged from easy to challenging, but none of them were frustrating to the point of making me want to bash my head in. I also appreciated the major goal of the game: building a ship. It wasn't something I knew a whole lot about, and there were some leaps of logic required, but the novelty factor helped quite a bit. I'm sure if I grew up in the shipyard I would have been howling about the lack of realism.

Now with all that said, the parser is still primitive. There's still the lack of helpful responses more often than not. However, because the game is paced well, with puzzles usually ramping up in difficulty as the game progresses, you're left with feeling a sense of achievement. In contrast, Adventureland was more like running around into a series of dead ends. PA is also linear, so here's fair warning if you dislike that in games. (Usually I detest that, so there's something to be said for this game in that alone.)

All in all, PA is one of Scott Adam's best, and if you're willing to put up with the neolithic-age parser for ten minutes, you just might end up playing the game for much longer.