Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This MSDOS game, which I played in DOSBOX, is a collection of extraordinarily hard puzzles. You enter an intersection of hallways, with each direction in the hallway having a door with a puzzle. Past those puzzles are harder puzzles. Past those puzzles are...way too many puzzles.

This is one of the very largest adventure games, and even the easiest puzzles are way too hard for most people. If you are an adventure puzzle fanatic, you can try this game. Expect many, many, many random deaths. I'm giving it 3 stars for being polished, descriptive, and good at instilling an emotion: annoyance.

You're King Arthur, and can't leave because Guinevere won't let you.

This is a short game, yet still frustrating. The many actions you have to do are hard to conceive of before doing them.

The author said on rec.arts.int-fiction that they wrote this game in 3 days, and it shows. It's not horrible, because the scope was small enough to allow for some polish, but it doesn't sparkle.

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 is a fun little Alan game (requiring an older interpreter from ifarchive.org) about running to get to playing ifcomp games on time.

The game is well-hinted; I only had one guess-the-verb problem. You basically just hail a taxi and drive over to your friend's house.

The game is on a timer, but its so short that once you figure it out, its super easy to redo. It also has a clever ending.

I downloaded this game and got it to run with the batch file. However, it was buggy; I couldn't figure out how to throw the soup on the fire, one of the earliest commands. The soup kept being an object ON the fire. And examining the hat at the very beginning was supposed to send out a dove, but that never happened.

It seems like a complicated game, but it is just intractable.

This is how homebrew parsers should be; and it makes sense, coming just 3 years after Inform was created and making new parsers was less intimidating.

This is a compact fantasy world, with only 7 or so locations. It has a gnome, a toadstool garden, and a mad scientist. It has good cluing, and fun, open mechanics including potions/chemicals you can try on things (nothing complicated).

The only thing I found difficult was that one important room exit was only mentioned once, in one event, with no way to read that text again once it scrolled back. So its important to read everything carefully.

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.

This game uses a home-written parser for a story about travelling to work.

Hardly anything is implemented, like X or compass directions or inventory or disambiguation. You travel to work, passing several obstacles in the way.

The writing is really unusual, and I kind of like it and kind of don't. It's really, really overblown, something like "You stand here with your beautiful, gentle wife, basking in the happy glow of home life in your kitchen.."

The game's biggest merit is that must have been hard to program.

This game is a straightforward implementation of Planetfall's sample transcript. A few things are different, since the Inform and Infocom parsers have different responses.

The original transcript ends in a premature death. This game does not; however, the new ending sequence is barely there, a matter of a few moves.

It's well-done, but very small. The smallness is even smaller when the game informs you that portions are blocked off because its not finished by the author.