Reviews by Dan Fabulich
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Don't sleep on Lid Astray, November 19, 2023The eye-blinking mechanic is wild. You've just gotta try it.
The game is short, but I think I couldn't handle an eye-blinking game any longer than this one!
Read the first footnote first, May 16, 2023Don't make the mistake I made, of reading all of the written metatext material in the GUIDE before you start playing.
Instead, just start by typing PS 1 to read the first footnote. (Whenever you see footnotes in brackets, e.g. [CAS 1], you can type the text in brackets to read the footnote.)
The first footnote includes a tutorial, allowing you to start playing and familiarize yourself with the characters before you dive into the metatext.
(Unfortunately, some of the metatext implies that you need to read the metatext first, and in particular, that you need to read every page of the metatext just to find out how to read footnotes, to find out how to access the tutorial. IMO, this is a bug in the tutorial, and I hope it gets fixed.)
I, myself, really didn't enjoy this game, because I spent an hour scrutinizing the metatext before engaging with the characters.
But you won't make that mistake. You'll like this game much more than I did, because you read this review.
I wanted to enjoy it more than I did, January 29, 2023I like a lot of the ideas in this game, and many of the puzzles were solid, but I became totally dependent on the in-game HINTS command, and I felt I had to conclude that a lot of the puzzles weren't fair.
(Spoiler - click to show)A number of the puzzles (including three of the compound spells) require you to LOOK UP X in the book where X is a term you haven't seen mentioned in the game yet. That could be OK if the answers were extremely clearly right in hindsight, but I kept finding that I tried a bunch of reasonable LOOK UP X commands, and then I'd check the hints, and then… womp womp, none of my reasonable guesses worked. Instead I should have looked up Y.
I don't think it makes sense to have "guess the topic" puzzles unless the author provides support for a lot of topics (or, at the very least, a lot of synonyms), and at the minimum help me out with "warmer/colder" hints. Otherwise, after a few failed guesses, I'm forced to assume that there's no puzzle to solve here at all. Good puzzles have to seem inevitable in hindsight, and none of the "make a wild guess about what to look up" puzzles ever did.
In addition, the puzzle in the cavern was… not good. I'd put the obsidian slab in the obsidian block, and didn't realize that I could bring it back out again. But even if I'd brought the slab with me, I put a bone on the altar and it didn't seem to do anything, so I never discovered that the bone would disappear.
Nasty, with bugs that make it Cruel, July 11, 2022The object of this one-room game is to open a safe in the center of the room. The safe has a large red button. Here's what it says when you push it:
If it were as easy as that, the bank probably wouldn’t have needed to call a superhero, don’t you think?
That sounds like "you can't push this button" to me. But, instead, you're just supposed to "push the button" again. At that point, the safe asks for a password, on a countdown timer. If you don't have the password (or the (Spoiler - click to show)companion you need to get the password), there's no way to discover and use the password before the timer runs out.
This puzzle is "Nasty" on the Zarfian cruelty scale. The game doesn't benefit from a countdown timer at all, and there are multiple puzzles where you have to just do the same action repeatedly to get a surprisingly different result.
Furthermore, the game is buggy.
(Spoiler - click to show)- If you ask Pastiche to unlock the safe before you've solved the password puzzle, the game deposits an "invisible force field" in the room, which never goes away.
- If you tape anything to anything that you're not supposed to, e.g. if you "TAPE THE CLIP TO THE PEN," you can never unstick them; you're walking dead at that point.
- You can't call the office until you examine the pen. ("Which number would that be, then?") But when you do examine the pen and call the number, the game says, "Fortunately, part of your Ingenuity training is that you can memorize phone numbers at a glance. Not that you needed to here, since you have the number written on that ballpoint pen, but it’s a nice trick to show off at superparties."
- Conversation topics with NPCs are very specific. You can "ASK LEXICON ABOUT WORD" but not about "THE WORD".
- When you "ASK CLAPPER FOR PASSWORD" she claps and Clapper herself beeps. (This makes no sense, because she's not a password of any kind.)
- The Safe has a password, and a lock, and it's hard to open when unlocked. But there's nothing telling you whether the safe is closed and locked or closed and unlocked.
- After opening the security box, it's not described when you "LOOK."
Unfinished; unplayably buggy, July 11, 2022In this game, you can fight a wolf or a bear. During the tutorial, you fight the wolf, and then the bear. You can't defeat the bear in the tutorial, so you must run (or lose the fight).
At that point, the game lets you "nap" in one of two locations, the field or the forest. If you nap in the field, you have a random chance of meeting a trader. If you nap in the forest, well, the game is then supposed to give you a random chance of meeting a trader or fighting a wolf or bear, but, in fact, you'll only meet a trader.
This game is distributed as Python source code, allowing me to read the code to debug it.
The problem lies in the "random_events" function in Handler.py. It computes a max value "a" (for example, a=9), then computes a random value "b" from 0 to "a", as if rolling a die with 9 sides. The game then never uses the random variable "b", but instead uses the variable "a", as if the player had always rolled the maximum value on the die. As a result, the player only ever meets the trader, regardless of whether you nap in the field or forest.
This was all preventable if the author had followed common-sense guidelines, such as the IFComp guidelines for authors. https://ifcomp.org/about/guidelines
The guidelines there say to playtest your game and to credit your beta testers. But the "credits" command (which only works when you're not in combat or trading) credits only the author, and no beta testers. I think that if anyone had beta tested this game, they would have discovered this bug, and the author would have fixed it before now.
Furthermore, the guidelines recommend using an IF authoring tool like Inform or TADS, and not to implement your own parser implementation in Python. Distributing the game as Python made it unnecessarily difficult to play.
Finally, upon reviewing the code, I see that there's no way to "win" the game. Even if the randomizer bug is fixed, at best, you might fight the bear, drink a few health potions, and win the fight, but you just get a few more units of meat, bone, and fang from winning. The more experience points you earn, the higher your "level" is, but leveling up doesn't do anything.
There should be a way to win the game. Perhaps the game might end saying "you win!" when you defeat the bear. Ideally, there would even be some kind of story, giving me a reason to fight wolves and bears.
A big game, but buggy, March 6, 2022This is a review of Release 7. We played this game at the Bay Area IF Meetup today; it's charming, and large, but very buggy. We were unable to complete the game, even after reading all of the hints.
I reported a bunch of the issues we encountered on the intfiction.org forum; I'm looking forward to Release 8.
Substantial, buggy, March 4, 2022This review is of Release 3. The game credits no beta testers, which I generally take to be a bad sign.
I got stuck hard when I hit this bug: (Spoiler - click to show)I gave the computer tape to Roderick. You're supposed to give the tape to Doktor Giftig; if you give it to Roderick, the tape is gone forever and the game is unwinnable.
The game has a huge map, and tries to limit the size of the map by not letting you explore areas of the map until you've solved earlier puzzles. I generally regard that as good puzzle design, but the game doesn't give you enough hinting that the unlockable areas are now unlocked, most of the time. (Spoiler - click to show)You can't go north from Weed-Choked Street until Roderick tells you to find the cargo pod, but there's no clear reason why you can't do that earlier, or why you CAN go north after telling him that. You can't go east from Wide Street until Roderick has the orders and Giftig has the tape, but there's no clear reason why that is; the game has no clear goal at all at that point.
I think this game is still playable if you use the source text itself as a hint system of sorts. When you get stuck, peek at the source and see if you can figure out how to get you unstuck that way.
Needs testing, February 27, 2022I think this game is off to a good start, but it needs testers, and preferably some hints and/or a walkthrough. (I guess it's possible that someone already tested this game, but the game doesn't mention any testers or any credits, so I assume by this that nobody did test it.) I recommend asking for testers on the intfiction.org forum.
Here's some material I would have sent the author if I were a tester.
The game is missing a bunch of "standard" commands:
* HELP (you can type "?" instead, but it's easy to overlook that, and if you do overlook it, there's no easy way to discover that it's missing)
* RESTART (to start the game over again). In practice, "QUIT" does something similar, but that wasn't obvious.
* X as an abbreviation for EXAMINE
* ABOUT for information about the author and testers
* TALK. The game uses "SAY" as its verb to communicate with NPCs, but "SAY" doesn't appear on the "?" menu (it only appears in the intro screen at the start of the game, which you can't easily get back to, because you can't RESTART). "TALK" could be a synonym for "SAY", or, at the very least, if you try to "TALK" or "ASK" or "TELL", the game could invite the player to use "SAY" instead, and in particular to "SAY HI."
In addition, most of the NPCs are missing most conversation topics. At a minimum, you should be able to SAY any of the items you're carrying, or any of the other NPCs, e.g. "SAY THEENA" to Dion.
I gave up after I died. I examined the payphone and a coin fell out, but "EXAMINE COIN" failed. Stephanie said to "present a coin for passage," but "PRESENT COIN" failed. "GIVE COIN" "PAY COIN" "PAY FERRY-PERSON" all failed.
This is what testers are for: to find the places where the author may think it's obvious what to do/say next, but testers weren't able to guess it, so you can add some synonyms (or at least recognize what the player was trying to do and hint them in the right direction).
Also, I didn't like the "green screen" effect. It's using a monospace font, but the letters don't fill the width of their grid slot, so the letters look like a ransom note, with wildly differing amounts of space between letters. For example, in the word "seem," the letters "se" have more space between than "em," which makes it unnecessarily hard to read.
A short time-travel story, January 4, 2022By means of the matches, you'll travel through time and space to various places, meet a handful of charming NPCs, and solve a dozen inventory puzzles. Keep notes and you'll probably solve it in under an hour.
Veeder's NPCs are always reliably charming, and this game is no exception.
As I write this, the game identifies itself as "Episode 1" of a series. Thus far, it's a fine short piece; I'm curious to see how it expands in subsequent episodes.
A charming mini randomized adventure, January 4, 2022This game includes a few dozen rooms presented in a random order. You're given a menu of options, which often invite you to take a risk to get greater reward. Most of the rooms have a joke or a clever word or two.
You'll probably lose at least once, but when you continue play after losing, the game will present you only rooms you haven't seen. I won on my second try after doing that.
With persistence and just a little luck, you'll probably get to the bottom in well under an hour.
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