Ratings and Reviews by Havoc Crow

A light-hearted, funny adventure, reminding me sometimes of Discworld, and sometimes of classic cartoons in its use of traditional humor tropes (hammy hero (and I don't mean the pig), wacky chases, crossdressing, etc.) The game world may seem a little intimidating at first with its many rooms, but the puzzles are simple and satisfying enough (the way you deal with the (Spoiler - click to show)vending machine is good for a laugh).

Most controversially, near the end the game takes a detour from pure comedy into social commentary on things such as gender roles and LGBT issues, and these parts feel a little grating; you might enjoy the ending less or more, depending on how you feel about that kind of lecturing. The finale feels a bit underwhelming, but one tiny detail I loved was (Spoiler - click to show)tasting the label-switched potions alluded to throughout the game, their effects hinting towards how each and every transformation in the castle had happened.

An 80's game made with a system called "GAGS", which I'm unfamiliar with, but judging from the datafile's structure it seems rather inflexible (no synonyms; room or object descriptions cannot be changed during the game; only a handful of verbs, which leads to awkward commands — such as having to type (Spoiler - click to show)"push computer" when you want to press a key on the keyboard — as well as repetitive and simplistic puzzles.) A lot of the inventory items and rooms seem useless and are there just for show.

In case the title hasn't clued you in enough, the author based the game on his religious beliefs; in the readme file, he states that this is "more than a game" and that he made it as an alternative to "games involving the use of "magic"". So instead of magic you have artifacts like "the sling of David", "the rod of Truth" etc. used to kill allegorical monsters like the "wolf of unbelief" (although one of the monsters (Spoiler - click to show)is instead killed with an ordinary coin for some reason... I'm wondering if it's a bug.) There are some hints regarding which weapon to use on which critter, but on the whole you probably won't need them, as, barring parser problems, the game is rather easy (apart from a single illogical puzzle where you need to (Spoiler - click to show)"turn diamond" to get out of the mirror room — the diamond is an item you can pick up and carry around, so how can you "turn" it?), and even though it's possible to get stuck by leaving items behind locked doors, it's usually obvious which inventory items you're missing. Be warned, though, that the ending is very unsatisfying.

PS. One rather cringeworthy moment in the game is finding a newspaper and a magazine which have no role in the puzzles, and seem to exist solely to push the author's wish fulfillment about how USA becomes a completely Christian-run country by 1994, and how future generations will shake their heads at today's heathen pleasures of "cigarettes" and "television". It's not wrong per se to promote your personal beliefs through your works, but it's risky and tough to do right — and the way it's done in the game feels very much on-the-nose.

There is a maze. You enter the maze and wander around randomly until you either win (with a standard victory message) or die (as above - standard death message). That's all. That's all there is. Do not waste your time. There is nothing amusing or interesting about this so-called "game".