Ratings and Reviews by Dan Fabulich

The core mechanic of this game is a latin translation mechanic. Once you get the hang of it, you can perform it by rote.

But (Spoiler - click to show)the game has a fitting twist ending for an Ectocomp game that makes the whole thing delightful. Surprising, but inevitable in hindsight.

A small piece that tells a simple, heartwarming story.

It's a very short piece. The walkthrough says that it's heavily randomized, which some people love, but I don't care for it. Everything I look at makes my character feel sad and existential. I'd have preferred if the game had more story, e.g. some characters with goals and conflicts, or even just a surprise or two (building up my expectations and then subverting them).

A charming mini game.

The game around this game is the game.

The author provides the source code for this game on the game's website, but it's in the form of an image, and the source is minified so as to make it harder to read.

Luckily, Ant Hope did the hard work for you, analyzing the source.

And it turns out, your choices have no effect. (If you played this game like I did, pressing enter for Y on every turn on your first playthrough, you probably guessed as much.)

The instruction manual and strategy guide are deliberately misleading about this, but, in hindsight, their awkward phrasing includes subtle hints that your choices have no consequences. Like this passage from the intro:

If you allow your imagination to help you elaborate each stop on your journey, and if you truly get into the mindset of the returning wanderer, Amazing Quest will offer you rewards as you play it again and again.

So, this game leaves something to be desired. But the meta-game has a puzzle: decode the source code. And now I've spoiled it for you.

But the meta-game also has a toy: play Amazing Quest and use your imagination to tell your own story with it.

If the documentation had been more honest about the game's purpose ("it's a little procgen ditty for the C64; see if you can imagine your own story to go along with it,") I could have given it a better rating.

But instead, I claim that it's a prank, a joke played on the player. I appreciate that the prank is a puzzle with a solution, and that there are even some clues to help you solve the puzzle. But IMO this game, this prank, treats its players disrespectfully.

This game would be 100% better by having players opt-in to the joke, so we're all in on it together. As it stands, you, having read this review, can now enjoy Amazing Quest on its own terms, though you probably can't enjoy the process of decoding the source, not now that I've spoiled it.

The puzzle of this game is figuring out its menus. I played on easy mode with plenty of money, but I couldn't figure out how to buy the stuff I needed to keep my mood from falling rapidly to 0.

It's possible that figuring out the menus is supposed to be the point, somehow, but I don't think so… I think the game was trying to force me to consider trading off alternatives (money, power, mood). But since I couldn't really figure out the menus, I didn't get the opportunity to make those choices.

This game took first place in Event One of the Second Quadrennial Ryan Veeder Exposition for Good Interactive Fiction.

Entries in Event One of the Second Quadrennial Ryan Veeder Exposition for Good Interactive Fiction were written over the course of one weekend. The challenge of Event One was to create a game in Inform 7 with beautiful source code text.

The source code of this game is delightful, and you simply must read it. No, seriously, the game is basically unplayable (its puzzle is unfair) unless you read the source.

I played the game with the story file in an interpreter, which is normally my preferred way to play IF, but as a result, I missed out on a message that appears in the HTML "Play Online" version:

An Entry in Event One of the Second Quadrennial Ryan Veeder Exposition for Good Interactive Fiction.

The challenge of Event One was to create a game in Inform 7 with beautiful source code text. Therefore, you may be interested in viewing the source code text.

This game and quackoquack's Moving (On) are stories about caring relationships between close friends told via the medium of parser IF.

There are precious few games like this; so much of parser IF is about using your superior intellect to solve devilish puzzles about things ("moderate-sized specimens of dry goods" as JL Austin puts it), often with a comedy theme, because solving puzzles in this way always feels faintly absurd.

quackoquack's games subvert this structure. Mind The Gap asks the player to solve a scheduling problem (and a traveling sales problem) in order to have cozy, personal moments with all of the friends you want to see in London, with bonus points available if you can help create and support connections between your friends, especially the ones who don't see each other often enough. Each meeting is sweet (bittersweet), tender, and genuine.

I very much look forward to her next work!