Reviews by MathBrush

The Unnkulia games filled the gap between the end of Infocom/Magnetic Scrolls and the beginning of Inform. They were juvenile, focused on 'bro' type humor, misogyny, and underclued puzzles.

This game manages to ampmlify all of that. It suffers from several problems, including an overly large scope. Every location has several paragraphs of text, frequently a whole page. The puzzles use moon-logic where it's very hard to know what will happen next.

This game seems strongly influenced by the previous year's massive Mulldoon Legacy. You are investigating your uncle's museum/hotel, and you discover a crackling energy portal leading to ancient times.

The game has some tricky puzzles, and the published version is in fact not completable. However, the source code provided does compile correctly.

I found the game to be fun but to have way too many 'guess the author's brain'-type puzzles.

This is a big game with a lot of personality. I haven't heard of anyone who's actually finished it, though.

You play an overweight, nerdy character who wants to be popular with the head cheerleader. You are going to try to get underage beer. It has a Jim Munroe sort of feel.

This game is full of NPCs and things to do and strange subplots, but its somehow hard to achieve anything besides wandering around. This is a game that would strongly benefit from a walkthrough. As it is, the hints are good, but each hint leads to other hints you should do first and the first steps are never really mentioned.

I was excited to finally play the first John Evans game, as he had become a legend in my mind from his other games.

John Evans is known for entering massive, extremely bold games into the comp that are just not finished. Games where you create the world, or where you can do anything you want, that kind of thing.

Castle Amnos is actually relatively tame and finished compared to the later games. There is a castle with five floors, reachable by an elevator whose buttons seem to work randomly. I was able to learn a variety of spells. It seems the game is mostly unfinishable, but the textdump showed me the ending.

Overall, it was fairly fun.

This game had just too big of a scope and not enough polish to work out. It is a sprawling fantasy game, with a village and a town and a tower and an underground dungeon and an island and so on and so on. It has a homebrew parser. Contrast this with The Land Beyond The Picket Fence from the same year; its homebrew parser is much more polished, the map is tiny (7 or 9 or so locations), and its slick and smooth. Both games probably had roughly similar amounts of work put into them, but Eldor is just spread too thin.

However, Stuart Allen released The Unholy Grail the next year, which is a fantastic game, so I strongly recommend it.

This is a point and click adventure. I couldn't get past an ogre, and from reading reviews, I don't know anyone (except maybe one person) who actually beat it; there's an ogre that's hard to get past.

You wander around a girl's boarding school at night before discovering an unsavory conspiracy involving scientific experiments on dreams.

This game manages to be offensive on almost every level without being actually obscene. If you want to play a game based on massive diarrhea, being rude to your mother, offensive racial stereotypes (including Injun Jim and Italian and Mexican characters who add 'o' after every word), sexism, entering giant bodily orifices, senseless murder, and random drug use, this is the game for you.

The parser itself does an okay job of recognizing commands, but it has some actually brilliant innovations, like little popup windows that tell you what's going on elsewhere, and a great implementation of hangman. But why its put in as an implementation of an childish and offensive BIG game whose favorite puzzle form is the obscure riddle is beyond me.

There is a dragon in town, and it's your job to rescue the mayor's daughter from them.

This game has more of an open-world feel, with many challenges that can be completed in any order, and a slowly unveiling realization of what's going on.

The problem, though, is that only a small slice of that open world has been implemented, making it very easy to do the wrong thing due to lack of guidance. It also has a really, really big maze that can be hard.

Interesting concept, and fun to play with a walkthrough.

This game take the purposeful obfuscation of the last 2 games and ramps it up even higher. There are numerous independent NPCs, every turn has an ongoing story, the stool and parts from the first two games shows up, etc.

Decompiling again got me the ending, which was a fitting ending for this trilogy of games.

The writing may be interesting to even those who haven't played the first two games.

This game is the sequel to Hard Puzzle, and like the first, it has some purposely underimplemented parts, and lies about its difficulty and even about your goals (or does it?)

I haven't finished it yet, but I've read all the text from decompiling, and I know the last command(s), just not the middle.

In any case, the game has a large number of critters with independent AI and some emergent behavior. It's fun to play around with.