Reviews by Dan Fabulich
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A cute little game, April 4, 2021There's not a lot to it, (the game is over before you know it) but the puzzles are fair, and there's some cute stuff. I look forward to the author's future work.
I didn't think it was fair that (Spoiler - click to show)the game docks you three points for turning on the TV.
A nice little romp as a deer, April 4, 2021You're a deer. You do deer things. It's pretty cute. The whole game is over in 10 to 15 minutes, maybe 30 if you decide to use the back button to explore all endings.
The language is strange, perhaps intentionally strange, but at some places it seems just accidentally ungrammatical.
(Spoiler - click to show)At one point, you meet a deer who's hurt, and you have the option to try to save the deer. You do, but the other deer then apparently walks away from the accident, apparently uninjured…? This seems like a bug.
Hazelden could have solved this, April 4, 2021The game is pretty easy. The murderer and the alibis are selected at random. (Spoiler - click to show)Only the murderer has no alibi, falsely claiming "I was in place X; character Y saw me there" but when you ask character Y, Y will say that they didn't see the murderer. You go outside, accuse one person, and the game ends.
I would have liked the puzzle to include a little more depth, something that gave me a sense of surprise (while still being solvable in hindsight).
I don't know why, but in Chrome 89 for macOS 11.2.3, the sound effects were horribly choppy. I switched to Safari 14 and it worked much better. It appears that opening this game (or any Strand game?) pins a CPU in Chrome.
The voices sounded computer generated, which was weird, but sometimes they really worked. I'd be curious to learn more about how the author made these sounds.
Needs one more thing, April 3, 2021The premise of this game is pretty zany, and I enjoyed that. But I wanted a little something more after (Spoiler - click to show)getting the "true ending" and learning her name.
The About screen has a "Spoiler" section that explains the entire plot, to help make sense of it if you're still confused after seeing all of the endings.
(Spoiler - click to show)My feeling is that while the twist ending #5 is surprising, I feel like I wanted to do something more with the discovery. I randomly stumbled across ending #5 fairly early on and explored the rest of the endings using the back button. Some games give you one last "real ending" to discover after you've discovered all of the other endings; I think this game would really benefit from that. Maybe ending #2 could have a variant ending #8 if you've previously seen ending #5, where you ask for her help and she gives you a name, or something like that.
An Epic Adventure, March 7, 2021We played this game at the SF Bay Area IF Meetup, and we had a delightful time with it. It's *very* deep and *very* long, at least tens of thousands of words and a couple of hours of playthrough.
Time loops are a fantastic structure for puzzles, and the romanceable NPCs help keep the game from getting too repetitive.
Let's-a Go!, February 3, 2021A fascinating little Twine game based on real-world leaked documents.
A lot of the best Twine games use the form to reflect on its own structure and the feeling of making choices; this game does precisely that, using its "simulation" setting to allow you to decide not only how you'll approach the negotiation but how The Subject responds to your tactics.
Charming, November 7, 2020The 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.
Your choices have no effect, and that's the point (of the joke), October 6, 2020The 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.
A lovely little Twine story, October 3, 2020A small piece that tells a simple, heartwarming story.
The start of something interesting, October 3, 2020It'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).
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