Ratings and Reviews by cgasquid

a small number of locations, many of them containing nothing but scenery and background.

an NPC who follows you around and can be asked about things, and whose presence is necessary in certain situations.

a small number of objects to be collected to solve a handful of puzzles.

The Temple is very consistent with commercial IF in the late 1980s. it's a short game, with a couple of "read the author's mind" moments (it would never have occurred to me that (Spoiler - click to show)the translated book changes the descriptions of other items when carried, instead of it being an object i could CONSULT or READ) and lucky coincidences, but nothing truly awful. the prose is better than average, and i got at least moderately attached to the NPC by the end of the game.

a good way to spend a couple of hours. with a little polish it would be a classic short game.

Beet the Devil primarily shines in its writing. nearly every sentence is bursting with the PC's personality, from his individual judgments of the goings-on around him to his phlegmatic reaction to very extraordinary events.

that said, Beet the Devil is essentially a long, linear corridor, with the useful items front-loaded in the first few locations. you never have more than one puzzle to work on, and most of the solutions involve using vegetables for purposes they were clearly not intended for.

a small amount of lateral thinking is needed in some places, though if you WAIT at a location for a few turns you can usually get some kind of indication of how to proceed. the final single-turn puzzle is so obvious yet so difficult to think of that it's probably a masterpiece (on par with Madventure's).

on the negative side, the implementation is a bit shallow. TALK TO would have been nice, given the extraordinary number of puzzle NPCs, and many reasonable solutions to problems didn't work because the parser had trouble with prepositional phrases. as noted, the game is linear, so if you're stuck on a puzzle you're going to stay stuck. the few places that it seems the game is about to open up, it turns out only one exit is usable. you can get hints from the PRAY command, but they only tell you which object to use, not how.

overall, the writing is worth the half-hour of your time it'll probably take to make it through. i'd love to see something more elaborate from the author.