Ratings and Reviews by cgasquid

The expectation that we have from interactive fiction is challenge; either a game will challenge our minds with puzzles, challenge our dexterity with action elements, or challenge our worldview and emotions with viewpoints other than our own and experiences we have never had.

"An Amiable Planet" is a short game about love, peace, and helping others. The place you are in is one of the most pleasant I've ever imagined, full of beauty, friendly NPCs, and wonderful sensory experiences. Yes, some of these creatures need help, but you don't need to solve puzzles to do so; you just need to remember the things you've seen.

There really isn't anything to "solve" in this game. It takes about twenty minutes to see all of the content. But I found it very enjoyable, and I may find myself dreaming about some of these places. And that makes me happy.

... this kind of game CAN'T be written under time constraints.

When you've got a wordplay game, you really need to be prepared for absolutely anything the player would try. There has to be some kind of feedback, some kind of cluing, some way for the player to think of the rhymes that the author intended. Here, typing anything wrong pops up a reminder that it didn't recognize your rhyme and normal verbs don't work.

What's more, there was a feature in another entry I played where you were informed if you got half the rhyme right. I got a rhyme half right in the second room and just got the same generic message.

Andrew Schultz is very good when taking as much time as is necessary; I very nearly solved Very Vile Fairy File with no hints because the game itself was so user-friendly. But these time-limited competition games just fundamentally do not work.

This story is the direct adaptation of the Call of Cthulhu adventure "The Haunting," typically used as the first adventure in a campaign to get players used to the research-investigate-probably die cycle that the RPG follows. The game follows the investigation point-for-point, and quotes from the adventure repeatedly.

Nowhere in the game or its description do I see any mention of the original adventure, of the fact that this is an adaptation and not a fully original work, or any credit given to the original author. There is a vague reference on the itch.io page, but frankly, that's not enough.

In any case this is a poor adaptation.

The early part of the game functions similarly to Leisure Suit Larry, where you have to know the names of specific locations to drive there, but there is no friendly cabbie to let you know the list of locations if you TALK TO DRIVER.

When you do think of the proper locations, all you do is walk through maybe a single room with an under-detailed NPC and then SEARCH whatever's in the room beyond. You can't LOOK UP things in the card catalog, you can't effectively ask people for help, just get to SEARCHing. The game has a conversation topic sequence but you don't get enough words for it to make a difference.

For all that the room descriptions are lush and detailed, not much else is. There are piles of unimplemented objects and default responses to natural actions, you "see nothing special" about unusual objects, and the shallowness makes solving puzzles impossible without reading the author's mind. There are also situations where your PC "decides" not to do something that would be a natural action, or where only one of two synonymous commands has been implemented.

Finally, the game ends with a randomized combat sequence that is heavily weighted against the PC. I was only able to complete it with repeated undo's and retries.

All in all, this is not Ectocomp's shining hour. I'm honestly surprised nobody caught this, as "The Haunting" has been included as a sample adventure in several editions of Call of Cthulhu and is one of those "shared experience" adventures that most players have gone through and love to share their individual stories about.