Reviews by Wade Clarke

This is the one of the best of the very early Eamons. A king hires you to rescue his daughter Rowina (sic.) so off you go to Hogarth's castle where she's being held.

The principal schtick of this game is that you should be loyal to your allies. Don't rip off your pals and don't rip off the king if you want to win... but of course in Eamon it's fun to see what happens if you muck everything up, as well.

Frequently saying the codeword 'HOWDY' elicits neat advice from your pals, which proves variously helpful or essential for the castle section. The castle itself is possibly over-elaborate, given that careful mapping can get you to your goal quickly and obviate the need to explore the whole thing.

In this fantasy adventure you must recover the eponymous sword which will save the world from oppression. The intro story is overly long for such a typical plot, but does set the scene for an atmospheric opening in which you are dropped off atop a cathedral by sky ship.

Unfortunately, the initial thrill of going on something like a thieving spy mission in enemy territory quickly gives way to some pretty aggravating puzzles. The precautions you must use to spirit the sword to safety without being detected are not unsophisticated in design or programming (you would hope not from a 2003 Eamon, as this is very much post-heyday) but they are well irritating, because you can wreck your game if you don't do the right things in the first few rooms, but you won't be told about your mistakes until you make it all the way to the end, at which point the game really rubs it in.

Other problems in this adventure are the stacked nature of some locations (in a handful of rooms, you need to examine almost every noun mentioned in the description to unveil a heap of embedded items - most other rooms contain nothing) and the vagueness of what you're trying to do once you get out of the cathedral. Some side puzzles have a lot of programming devoted to them but deliver unimportant payoffs which don't help you to complete the game. I spent ages trying to string together the right series of commands to achieve something in the blacksmith's shop.

In spite of its moments of undoubted sophistication, I found Sword Of Inari to be pretty hard going, even with its relatively small map - because of how easy it is to wreck your game without knowing about it, and how spread out and unpickable the most important puzzles are, and how hard it can be to dredge up the right command to interact with those puzzles.

Eamon#65 comes with a general thumbs up from the EAG, but I found it kind of tiresome. It's a bunch of straightforward combats set in a contemporary school, written from the point of view of a ye olde warrior (you) who has travelled through time to reach it.

The descriptions are arguably clever and consistent, but somehow I just found the overall effect monotonous. The school's boring, the combat verges on being sparse, and continuing to map the school required an effort of will on my part.

This early Eamon adventure kicks off by dumping you in a dungeon in Hades. The place isn't as diabolical as you might expect given its location in the universe, but it does feel threatening due to decently atmospheric room descriptions, which often suggest something terrible is just around the corner. What's usually around the next corner is more dungeon and the occasional battle.

There are, by modern gaming standards, a handful of aggro puzzle moments here. The way to deal with the Iron Door in the first room doesn't make any kind of sense. (For puzzle advice, read Tom Zuchowski's review at the Eamon Adventurer's Guild). I'd throw in one more kind piece of advice which will prevent you from tearing your hair out - (Spoiler - click to show)in The Devil's Temple - make sure to note which wall the door is in before you open it. You can't read its description again afterwards.

Extremely sparse Eamon loot'n'kill from system creator Donald Brown, featuring a maze with some monsters and, fortunately, a minotaur. A pleasant easy map, but all the empty corridors you have to traipse through would be tedious if this adventure was any bigger. 'Lair' has one horrible instant death, thus starting a great(?) Eamon tradition. But for the second Eamon ever, this is decidedly alright.

Dracula's Chateau comes late in Eamon numbering, but apparently was written a lot earlier than that would indicate. In spite of having a few too many empty rooms in the castle, this is a fun and attractive Eamon romp with a basic 'fight monsters, grab treasure and escape' goal. It's got neato combat, the odd trick and an equally neat map layout.

The only thing you shouldn't waste time with is trying the 'DIG' command. It works in one room in the whole game, and there to lame effect.

The program did crash on me once, dropping me into BASIC.

A few glitches aside, Dracula's Chateau is a quality destination - albeit a simple one - for an Eamon vacation.

The child who was a child in the original The Forest House is now a teenager, and he (you) is dropped immediately into the eponymous house and confronted with monster and spook-shaped danger.

This game has little nods to Resident Evil (a shotgun on hooks on the wall) and Silent Hill (alternate realities with consequences for real realities) and considering the game's small size, it packs in quite the bite-sized adventure. It's probably the best designed and best to play of the three Forest Houses, in spite of being written in three hours and also subject to the OddComp 2008 restrictions on the number of allowable rooms, objects, tasks, events, and characters... (Spoiler - click to show)In this game's case, 7, 9, 11, 5 and 3 respectively.

These restrictions manifest primarily in the extreme lack of look-at descriptions for objects. You still can't get away with looking at nothing though, as there are a few objects which must be examined to enable progress.

The score system seems bizarre at first glance, being broken up into blobs of 17 points, but again this makes sense when you remember the game's comp bias towards odd numbers. One character is completely inscrutable, and though (Spoiler - click to show)the game has a couple of endings, trying to work out how to get whichever one you didn't get the first time may prove to be a hair-pulling experience. The inbuilt hints work well at all other times.

A higher-tech revision of this game would be welcome (though it might end up breaking the odd number patterns that determined most of its design), but instead what comes next is For3st House: Sacrifice, the most ambitious and craziest -- but also the most half-undernourished (?!) -- Forest House to date.

There aren't a ton of text adventure game series around, let alone series in which each episode deals with the same setting and characters over time. "The Forest House" and its two sequels can make these claims, and what's cool is that they were written over two years (2007-2008) as entries in Ectocomp and The Odd Competition. Furthermore, each game was written in the space of three hours, with all this entails; smallness in the first place, and bare bones programming and bugginess in the second.

If you find low production values or the idea of more simple games intolerable, you should probably drive away now. On the other hand, if you're the kind of person who might be fascinated by the prospect of watching one fantasy/horror story being built up in three quick steps, the first being the author's first game, the third already demonstrating leaps of ambition (probably unmatched by execution… it was still written in three hours) then you may also be a bit charmed by the Forest House saga.

In the first game, The Forest House, you play a young boy who wants to sneak out into the forest at night to explore a house which no-one else can see, not waking your sister or parents in the process. The game presents just a handful of puzzles and evokes a decent atmosphere of childhood excitement.

This very short debut is ultimately the most technically polished of the three games, since it was given a revision makeover by its author after the original Ectocomp. Neither of the sequels have received similar treatment at this time of writing, and it is very important to point out that version 1 of the original The Forest House should be avoided -- bugs make it not-completeable, plus there are numerous other errors and missing descriptions. Version 2 (available from the ADRIFT website) is the one to play.

On its own, this game presents as an unspectacular but neat debut. It becomes more interesting when viewed as the first part of a story. Sequel "Return to the Forest House" offers more action and features the same protagonist, now five years older.

In Heated you play a messy guy with a messy life who needs to get to work early, and in a more than presentable state, to secure a raise from the boss. This is a small adventure with a handful of domestic problems for you to solve in a finite number of moves. Things will go wrong frequently, and when they do, your heat-o-meter climbs in response to the aggravations. Get back on track and you will cool off a bit, hence the game's title.

The production is not polished (there are typos and incidences of inconsistent programming) but the important thing is that it works as a whole, however modest, and thus is fun if you enjoy figuring out how to optimise your path through a game's obstacles in the fewest number of moves. There are some Babel Fish-like moments à la Hitchhiker's Guide and some cute jokes like (Spoiler - click to show)the move-eater that your backyard turns out to be.

The game is too small for its inconsistencies to really mess you up, and its size is a plus in terms of the gameplay style -- as soon as you learn a better way of doing things, you can replay through an optimal path in a matter of seconds or minutes. This doesn't mean you can't save the game, but UNDO gets you further het up.

One problem with Heated only becomes apparent once you've completed it - (Spoiler - click to show)that the game's small scale mitigates against your heat level really having much of an effect. But the idea that life might work to sabotage us in little ways when we have a deadline comes through clearly.

(Review of the original IF Comp 2010 release)

Rogue of the Multiverse is a humorous sci-fi adventure with some wacky/peculiar dynamics which guarantee that its story maintains unpredictability for its short to moderate duration. Whenever you start to feel you might be getting a handle on your situation, the space carpet is likely to be pulled from underneath you in a slightly Hitchhiker's Guide fashion. The result is a mixture of pleasant surprises and disorienting turns which will cause each player to identify different bits that they enjoyed the most, and disagree with others about which bits made them go, 'Huh?'

(Spoiler - click to show)The game will also prompt arguments about whether one should make kissy faces at alien lizard doctors or try to sock them between their stupid beady eyes as soon as one gets the chance.

In this game you play the eponymous rogue, and while "Rogue of the Multiverse" sounds like a real badass title, the kind to be bestowed upon a Han Solo, the segment of your life portrayed here happens to be one of the mushier ones. In the space prison where the game begins, none of the other inmates react to you as if you have any street credibility at all, and pretty soon you're the lab monkey in the rather unimpressive experiments of one Doctor Sliss, a condescending lady lizard who is convinced that bananas are your god. I did feel a little annoyed at my own confusion at having to move about the science complex with the commands 'forwards' and 'backwards', but this ultimately wasn't a huge issue.

Thus a rogue's lot in life appears to be that of playing second fiddle to a reptilian scientist, searching randomised grids of alien turf for interesting people and things to tag at her behest. The descriptions of the alien inhabitants and their behaviours are pretty cute, and each bout of exploration feels not entirely unlike a game of Hunt The Wumpus. Once you work out what you're doing, this section is fun but pretty easy, so it's good that it doesn't outstay its welcome. I was disappointed, however, that I was not able to butter up some of the aliens with goodies procured from the Doctor's complex to convince them not to remove their tags.

Just when you think you've got this grid searching thing nailed, a helpful space agent shows up in a space toilet and assures you he can bust you out of captivity if you just buy him the stuff that will allow him to cobble the escape thingy together... Eww, but he's in the space toilet! Moving toward your escape is arguably the most tense part of Rogue, but afterwards, proceedings get - relatively speaking - even weirder.

My own sense of aggro towards Doctor Sliss, my former jailer, after the tables were turned (or at least shuffled around) never did find release. At first I thought the game was strongly signalling that I could not avoid casting my lot in with her, to the extent that when I had an opportunity to do something contrary to her wishes, I missed it. Plus I was probably distracted by the recent excitement of a chase on jet bikes, another sequence which arrived with the game's customary surprising-ness. What's obvious though is Sliss's presence as a well-written, if inscrutable, character, whether you feel amorous or murderous towards her.

The game's last scenes on another planet (assuming you go that route) feel like the unheralded ending of a Choose Your Own Adventure book, the one where you forget about the adventure you were having for the last 80 pages and suddenly travel to another time, meet new people and assume an entirely new role, all within the space of one page and one illustration. Of course this isn't literally what happens in Rogue, but it generates a similar sensation. And this is not an inappropriate final sensation for a game whose story structure and interests have hardly been traditional beginning, middle and end. The game feels more like a window onto the amusing and chaotic adventures of a rather put-upon individual, adventures which were probably just as strange before the game began and will continue to be as strange after the game ends. The title could almost be a joke, or at least ironic. Or it could be the po-faced earnest assessment of the main character's view of him or herself.

The game's peculiar turns felt weird while I was playing it, but they evoked a small portion of universe held together by wonky chance rather than sense. It was the vision of that wonky universe which stayed with me after I completed this well written and executed adventure.