Ratings and Reviews by Wade Clarke

GET MANIFE$TO is a small-to-mid-sized sci-fi/fantasy/comedy/surreal parser adventure set in an energy research compound which has gone kablowie. It's not a game which makes a lot of sense, aesthetically or plot-wise. The blurb says the PC is an investigator of the kablowie incident, but the PC starts the game trapped in the compound, seemingly not having experienced the explosion. Since they're locked in, and wondering how to get out, and not an amnesiac, how did they get in? And when? And why is the S in MANIFE$TO a dollar sign? If you don't ask such questions amd are prepared to take in your stride features such as wisecracking skeletons of the dead, the utter uselessness of NPC Larry the (talking) Lizard, or the presence of a supersoaker full of radioactive piss, you may be in the right mood for MANIFESTO's brand of regular adventuring, which takes the player on a satisfying, if somewhat strange, romp through a post-disaster lab.

The game does suffer from a lot of first IF implementation oversights: interesting-looking stuff that's not there, plurals vs singular vs synonym oversights, and an undersized catalogue of responses. The game mentions the TELL / ASK system (me personally: ARGH!) for communication in its HELP, but I don't think these commands are required to complete the game. The main NPC, Larry the Lizard, had nothing to say about anything which might have helped me win. Regarding the one topic I got him to respond to, I must admit to having pulled it from a disassembly of the game after I became completely stuck. I feel okay about my stuckness and can give readers of this review a non-spoilering hint which will prevent them from hitting the same problem: Know that READ and X are not the same in this game, and that the most important props in this game won't do their tricks if they aren't READ.

I got a few ad-hoc laughs from MANIFE$TO. It hails from the school of random-leaning wack which can miss as often as hit when things aren't all sewn together somehow. Some of it hit for me, some didn't, and some of it made me raise an eyebrow and ask, 'Why?'. The game does, however, have a meta tilt to it regarding creativity and rules, which has a payoff if you get to the end. One thing's for sure – nobody's going to be able to say this game heeded a bunch of rules. It's more of a Why Not game.

Homo Sapiens is a BDB adventure in which the PC is one of the earliest members of our species. The player's goal is to survive and find a mate.

HS worked better for me than the previous BDB game I tried, The Wrath of Anubis, because HS's lore and goals and elemental qualities are all in alignment. Playing an unsophisticated character in a raw world of physical dangers is the kind of thing that suits a two-word parser well. Not that this is strictly two-word; the BDB adventures are built in Inform, but of course the source material is a 1980s two-worder.

Being close to pre-tools, the PC must mostly make good use of nature. Breaking things will involve scaling heights. Zapping things will involve exploiting bad weather. Animals can interact with each other to player advantage, and weather can change the environment.

HS is a short game but it has a good density of environmental variation in both the map and mechanics. It also has some of the less kind logic of early 1980s games. For instance, you can't just exploit any height, only the ones especially set up by the game, even though there are other high-seeming places. With a map of this size, that's not a big problem. And the HINTs don't go too deep but at least they're there.

The scientific opinion as I write this is that women probably were involved in hunting and stuff, too, contrary to most popular depictions of prehistoric people. This game is a retake of a 1980s game which was one of those popular depictions, but there's really no social scope here, not even an apparatus for one. HS's action is about solving environmental puzzles in a prehistoric world. Its focus on natural solutions is a point of interest. The moment the social level is broached, the game is over. I'm not going to hold that against forty-year-old source material about some poor prehistoric bastard seeking to scramble up a rung or two on the hierarchy of needs.

This is the first of Garry Francis's BDB parser games I've played, though I have played the related (and excellent) A Taste Of Terror.

The Wrath of Anubis treads some of the wellest-worn of adventure game turf, the exploration of an Egyptian tomb. It's solid, but perhaps felt a little short to me, especially in light of the length of the blurb and introduction. The backstory involving Anubis, ancient history, curses and village traditions is (relatively) elaborate, but doesn't really inform the action, or add anything to the goal of finding a single important treasure, except that it casts the quest in a positive light - not one of those bad old lights! The original game is from 1987, a lot closer to the time of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1982) whose tomb-raiding influence on some of the situations is obvious.

The Wrath of Anubis can definitely be commended for delivering accessible versions of traditionally 'Argh!' challenges found in old (read: past forty years as I type this) Egypt-set adventures. Its desert maze is samey and semi-illogical, but still designed to be a doddle compared to the incarnation of this kind of thing found in, say, The Sands of Egypt (1982), or even a non-Egyptian game like Wizard and the Princess (1980). There are oases, a thirst timer, and a checklist demanding you find food, but each of these things is paid off in the least inconvenient way possible. This speaks to one of the BDB Project's stated goals of updating the games for modern players, while obviously retaining that core style of pretty pure text adventuring.

So the game has most of the major features of the tradition, executed well, but perhaps unspectacularly and not at length. I probably expect a lot when it comes to the Egyptian aesthetic nowadays, and Wrath didn't raise my excitement levels enough. It's still a good piece of work.