Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This Adventuron game has more words than any other I've seen. It's firmly in the Wodehousian vein, with a butler named Gieves and hijinks caused by upper-class British misunderstandings.

It was quite clever and parts of it were very funny (including the ending). It suffered from a certain problem that many humorous games have, which is that the author clearly had some very funny solutions in mind, but that requires several leaps of intuition that aren't always fair.

Overall, though, this is a hefty game with good writing and clever puzzles. I think this would have done fairly well in IFComp, placing in the top half.

This is an Adventuron Christmas game where the Reindeer are knocked out by your 'special potions' that Santa keeps in barrels. You have to recruit someone else to help!

The art is superb here, adding a lot to the game. The puzzles are a mixed bag, including a logic puzzle and a visually-based minigame where you have to guide pigeons across windy terrain.

Overall, I found the writing to be funny. The whole thing felt a little light, which makes sense since I suppose additional time went into crafting visuals. But it's worth a fun and silly 30 minutes, and I didn't run into any implementation issues.

In this brief Adventuron game, you have to set a trap for Santa to make him give you a present.

In writing, graphics, and gameplay, this resembled nothing more to me than a single puzzle (or maybe two) in a Scott Adams game. Everything is stripped down bare, and you have to get things exactly right for the game to recognize your answers.

It works overall as a puzzle, but here is my score:

-Polish: Everything is bare-bones.
-Descriptiveness: Same, the writing is minimalist and mostly just lists of present objects.
-Interactivity: I found the main puzzle frustrating, not in figuring out what to do, but in figuring out how to communicate it to the parser.
+Emotional impact: Despite the above, I found it fun to solve.
+Would I play again? It's brief enough that it could be fun to check out next year.

This is perhaps the most complex Adventuron game I've seen.

You play as a falsely-accused elf who has to find 7 missing presents. There are two main areas (an outside one and an inside one) as well as an endgame area. There are numerous NPCs, as well.

This game has its own share of Sierra-type-logic (such as there being 4 different sharp-bladed instruments, each of which can only be used on one thing) and adventuron implementation issues (the biggest being error messages not disambiguating between default statements for correct commands on non-interesting present items and correct commands with non-present items).

Fortunately, there are helpful hints in every room. Even with that, though, I had to comb through the itch pages (I found three different ones: the regular page, the submission page, and some comments in the community page for the jam) to finish off the game. Art's very good, and fortunately no puzzles require the art, for people who are visually impaired.

This Adventuron game has you using a teleporter to access three different areas with interlocking puzzles.

The story idea is clever: Bigfoot has been implicated in 3 different acts of mischief and is on the naughty list. He asks you to clear his name.

In a world of perfect implementation, this would be a fairly fun puzzle game. It relies on some visual puzzles included in the graphics.

Unfortunately, there are numerous errors. Adventuron doesn't let you know if an object is undescribed or you typed it wrong, so that caused a few issues with things like a vital but undescribed rock show ad. The main verbs necessary for solving two key puzzles are implemented weird (for one, (Spoiler - click to show)PUT something INTO something doesn't work but INSERT something INTO something does, and for the other (Spoiler - click to show)you have to UNSCREW something instead of TURNing or RATCHETing when you have a ratchet).

A few other things added up to make it a frustrating experience. If the game were polished a bit more, it would be more enjoyable. Still, it had many charming moments.

This is a great game. I went back and forth on a 4 or 5, but there are so many great little details that I'll definitely go with the higher score.

This is an adventuron game with a detailed life sim. You have to keep up your hunger, happiness and energy bars. In addition, you have to solve little puzzles that your wife (or partner?) Pel sets for you.

There are numerous illustrations, especially for the puzzles. The writing is solid.

The story isn't completely original (what is?) but is executed well. The life-sim is a bit easier than it could be but fits narratively. The puzzles are all in constrained environments and occur one at a time, but require ingenuity and creative thinking.

Definitely worth trying out. It does require the graphics as an essential component of the puzzles, though, making it difficult for visually impaired players.

This is an interesting setup for a game.

It's an adventuron game with pixelart illustrations of a dystopian future (presumably referencing Cyberpunk 2077, which I haven't played). You are a futuristic version of an elf in a timeline where Santa has sold out and delivers anything to anyone, no matter what side of the law they're on.

There are one or two puzzles at a time, and it requires careful exploration, but the limited verb set means that you should be able to figure out what you need to do, even if you have to think a bit to solve it.

The main puzzles involve codes you have to solve, which I found enjoyable.

I received a B ending, with a few ideas of what I might need to do next. It was fun, but I don't feel compelled to try again.

This is an Adventuron Christmas game that is quite large. You have to find out what 9 kids want for Christmas and make their toys after finding all the ingredients necessary. There is a large system of free shops and recipes for toys.

There are many locations and as of this writing all but one of them has art.

The puzzles range from fairly easy to the very obscure. The hardest puzzles were those involving guessing-the-verb or lack of in-game responses to incorrect actions.

This is large and complicated and I enjoyed it overall.

This is another entry in the Adventuron game jam.

It features some nice pixel art of a small village near a lake. You receive a dream message from a mysterious figure requesting your help.

It's a small game, with six or so locations and about a puzzle per location. The highlight for me was a cryptogram puzzle using symbols that you had partial information on, making it different than the regular cryptogram puzzle.

I felt like a few of the puzzle solutions were somewhat unfair, especially finding the book in the library, which dampened my enthusiasm a bit. But it was a fun short play overall.

This game was entered in the Adventuron Christmas game jam.

One of Adventuron's weaknesses is its parser, which, while strong, hasn't caught up to Inform, Dialog and TADS. This game neatly sidesteps that by making it a limited parser game, with the only commands being TAKE, DROP, EXAMINE, and LOOK.

There are only three rooms: a 'hub' room with a Christmas tree, a storage room containing almost all the gifts (including lords and ladies anxiously waiting around), and a kitchen with materials.

The entirety of the interactivity is picking up one item and dropping it in the right spot, hoping it interacts right. Technically, you could just take everything and dump it together (and I admit I took that course occasionally), but it's too tedious to do that without trying to analyze that ahead of time, especially since you have a carrying limit of 3 items (one of the few games where I think that limit enhances gameplay).

The rainbow colors and sound cues were nice.

+Polish: The game is polished;
+Descriptiveness: The descriptions of the gifts is fairly amusing
+Interactivity: This particular setup worked for me
+Emotional impact: It was heart-warming
-Would I play again? It was fun, but was a bit too long for the main gimmick for me.