Ratings and Reviews by Wade Clarke

Hippo on Elm St is a cute, shortish and nicely modelled adventure about a house hippo (they're small) scouting the place for food on Halloween. It's based on the world of a Canadian Public Service Announcement video from the 1990s (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNbw-qycyl4). I wasn't given this context when I helped beta-test it, which made the experience a tad perplexing for me. But then again, small, cute animals obviously need to eat, it's logical that other small, cute creatures might impede their attempts to do so, and if it's Halloween I shouldn't be surprised to encounter Halloweenish stuff, right?

The game environment is dynamic and a lot of the puzzles are about mutual exclusivity. Carrying one thing and not being able to carry another, being able to move in certain ways or on certain surfaces in certain circumstances and not others. It's clever like this and pretty dense for a small game.

Sticky points are that it's not always evident what you should be doing (if you lose focus, harken to the very first things the game said to you. House hippos are simple creatures with simple goals) plus the verbs themselves can be sticky. It's easier to finish the game than it is to get all the points, and there's still one I'm missing.

For cute, G-rated IF entertainment about snug-seeking house hippos who like tasty stuff, this is the house hippo game to beat.

Intending to test a new IF interpreter, I downloaded a random, small game from my wishlist: The Kazooist. Then I discovered that the interpreter I'd planned to test doesn't actually run Z-Code games. Not being a total churl, I played the game anyway.

The Kazooist is a tiny and deliberately silly (goofy, unfocused, poorly spelled) game that's barely a step beyond a 'learning to program in Inform 7' exercise. I suppose I got off-side with it immediately because its first room contained only a Pretty Cake that had no description. Eating the cake takes you to a dreamworld where you'll theoretically learn to play the kazoo, or just play the kazoo, but in reality you won't do either of these things. There are a few props, also without descriptions, and some locked doors. I had the solution to what I think was the last puzzle but couldn't find the phrase that would execute it, though I tried about twenty possibilities. There was a strong vibe that the game would have ended had I solved that puzzle. The truth is that I don't really know if it would have.

I cannot recommend this game for playing, though good on the author for already having updated The Kazooist during its lifetime.

PS - It turns out that where I gave up wasn't the end. Read the comments for the input of others.

The visiting of an open house is an activity eminently suitable for simulation by parser game. In Home Open, you're a prospective owner-renovator checking out a two-storey home. You get to observe the arrangement of rooms, jot critical shorthand notes about the furnishings on your pad, which is fun (NOTE BEDSTEAD) and generally poke around in a state of mild suspicion. Then comes unusualness – though some of the pre-unusualness prose sneaks through.

Home Open develops with a sense of mounting mystery, but I found the outcome to be too ambiguous for a satisfying pay-off. To its credit, the outcome prompted me to re-enter the game to seek out more information (did I miss something? I don't think I did). When I couldn't find anything new, I sat back and thought 'Hm,' my eyes focussing on a point slightly beyond the pane of the screen.

A few of the game's inaccessible props and portals don't yield to other obvious objects to which one might hope they would. e.g. A conspicuously interesting place that's too dark to see into still can't be seen into after obtaining a light source. Are the game's slice-of-life qualities looking for a fight with typical adventure game behaviours, and with prop-puzzle pairings like the light and the hole? Home Open is confusing like this, because sometimes the slice-of-life wins very decidedly and sometimes the classic adventure game puzzles win very decidedly.

Sometimes in life, a sideboard is just a sideboard. But ultimately, Home Open didn't radiate as much drama or explanation as I wanted, or as I felt it signalled it would.