Ratings and Reviews by Rovarsson

Zeppelin Adventure takes the player into the Zeerust-filled world of classic SF. The era where there were canals on the moon, intrepid adventurers found themselves hurtling through space in a hollow cannonball and there were little green men visiting us in various shapes of silvery shining teaware.

(Intermezzo:Zeerust--TV Tropes. Yes, I'll wait...)

In this particular work a humble tea-transporting zeppelin-farer (On Mars!) is swooped to the relics of the Robot Free State by way of a swirly-vortex-thingamajiggy. (Cue Robby the Robot in various slightly depressing incarnations.) The zeppelin crashes and the adventure turns into a hunt for scattered engine parts.

The mood of the game is deeply captivating. Nostalgic, endearing, funny, with unsettling undertones and references to disturbing episodes of Earth history. The visual qualities of the interface (and the cover art!) work to enhance this atmosphere.

The gameplay of Zeppelin Adventure encapsulates a parser puzzlefest in a keyword-click engine, Robin Johnson's own Versificator2. This means that all possible actions are, in theory, laid out for the player. In practice however, the amount of stuff in the inventory quickly becomes so large that mechanically checking all the possibilities would be a lot more work than just leaning back and thinking about the solutions.

At times, I missed the unboundedness of typing parser input. I yearned to interact with the world more freely to tease out more background, and here and there I thought I had an alternate tack for an obstacle that was simply off-limits in the click-approach.
However, the game feels very tight and focused, and the click interface plays no small part in this. It directs the player's attention to the salient bits of information in the descriptions while letting the rest of the text carry the atmosphere without being distracting.

The puzzles themselves have a similar focused and concentrated quality. Many are not easy, requiring multiple steps and a thought-out plan of execution to finally get the engine part dangling before our protagonist's nose. But they all have a definite and logical path to the solution, even if the player is temporarily baffled by the intricacies of the order of steps.

Depending on what the player chooses to do once the Zeppelin's engine is repaired, there are multiple endings. I happened upon one where I could help the robots as well as my character.

Great game!

Recidivism isn't a character flaw to you, it's a matter of pride. No sense in honing those burglar skill just to let them go to waste because some judge put you behind bars for a half year, right? Out of jail, back in the saddle, that's you. Or rather, back in the driver's seat of this car you just nicked on the way to Wychwood Manor. Your cellmate couldn't shut up about the stash of old loot that's still hidden there. It helped that he was talking in his sleep.

The elaborate introduction puts you squarely in the boots of this criminal protagonist and lends a welcome frame to this manor search. In the rest of the game, the descriptions are sparse but adequate. Many small details serve to strengthen the mood of the abandoned estate, and of course to distract the player and lure her into wasting time.
Yes, because time is of the essence! Although you arrived early in the morning, some nosy passerby or binocular-carrying neighbour is bound to call the coppers on you before long.

The map of the manor and the surrounding estate and farmer's fields is splendid. With sparse descriptions, the game still succeeds in evoking a wide countryside feel. A few hidden areas and locked rooms add the satisfaction of discovery to the exploration.
The final area especially, the fields behind the manor, is a joy to wander through and waste moves as you try to find out where to investigate next.

As is to be expected, one of the main obstacles of the game is getting your intentions across in two-word commands. EXAMINE (not X) works on a small but important fraction of the items in the descriptions, USE is necessary in some instances, and of course you can forget about UNDO.

Once you get a feel for what works, the puzzles are actually fun and challenging. Some neat seemingly straightforward problems that require one extra unexpected step. Including the oldest one in the book...

Good old-school fun in and around an abandoned country manor.

(This review is for the PunyJam version of the game)

This is a game which takes a tried and true adventure setup and squeezes the best out of it.
You wake up disoriented and amnesiac in an underwater base. Some kind of catastrophe has all but destroyed the place and it seems everyone has fled, leaving you alone.

The map is small but challenging. With a few crooked passages and bending corridors, the surroundings take on an eerie and ever so slightly disorienting feel. The locked doors (or functional equivalents thereof) serve their purpose well, guiding the player through the base until she has found what needs to be discovered.

Puzzles are common sense and straightforward. A few could be better clued, and I missed alternate commands for the necessary actions and reasonable synonyms for some important items.

A1RLOCK has a dark atmosphere. (The child-protagonist lightens the mood considerably here and there, for instance when she (Spoiler - click to show)Pew! Pew! Pew!-shoots a staple gun at random objects...)There is always the suspense of some gruesome revelation just around the corner. This feeling of expectation keeps growing until it is finally resolved in the final confrontation.

Lucid Night uses the frame of an interrupted night’s sleep filled with lucid dreams to present the player with a collection of small puzzles which take place in the dream world.

The puzzles are easy, heavily clued and tiny. Each does give the player that bit of satisfaction of finding the solution, and of looking around to see what your dreaming brain has come up with this time.

A laid-back bit of easy fun. Some distraction while you wait for the potatoes to boil.

It might be, were it not for the glimpses of the protagonist’s life we catch. There are vague references throughout the game to previous, more powerful lucid dreams, and to the character’s waking life that imbue it with a sense of mystery, even an unsettling feeling of unseen threat.

I enjoyed the writing, smoothly transitioning the PC from waking to dreaming without drawing too much explicit attention to it. The PC is used to dreaming, so the lucid sequences come as no surprise.
There is a nifty implementation feature in this game, of the “blink and you miss it” variety.

The puzzles were very common sense, especially for a dream-setting. I had expected some more moon-logic and surrealism to pop up as the game progressed.

A good game. The untold backstory of the PC keeps lingering in my mind.

“…those were the days of roses, of poetry and prose…”
Tom Waits - Martha

A poem draws the reader into the mood. A loner, anxious, on the sidelines. Choice anxiety, overwhelmed by a myriad options.
The poem, in its closing verse, promises comfort, soothing. A chance to see all options. Choice without choosing for it will all be turned back on itself.

Beautiful well-chosen prose drops you in the middle of a scene. A multitude of scenes, theatre stages next to each other to wander through. The setting is an expansion of Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, with its oyster bar, its foggy streets,…

But there! There is time. A minute counting back… Pressure to explore!

Until the minute has passed and all is restored, ready to revise.

The repetition renders the sixty seconds pressureless, devoid of tension. In effect, you have a free-floating minute, disconnected from external time and causation.

The result is a narratively empty (isolated from cause-effect, plotless), exploration-rich discovery of relations between locales and passages of text, streetlamp-lit alleys and overheard conversations. An endlessly revising everlasting minute wherein to choose all options and be returned to poetry.

A captivating, mindful experience.

(This review is for the competition version. I expect any small hairs will be removed from the buttery patisserie in an updated version.)

A cake so sumptuous the meagre word “cake” does not do it justice. A fruitcake so stuffed with raisins and nuts and confectioneries of all kinds, so soaked in the finest cognac, a Royal Fruitcake, if you will.

A cake fit for a King.

And that is precisely why you would have the King himself partake of this masterpiece, and humbly implore him to fund your expedition into the secrets of even more delicious Patisserie. If only that stubborn guard would let you through.

A game which starts with a seemingly simple premise, present a cake to the King, and builds on it, complicates and layers it until it becomes a hilarious obstacle-filled endeavour.

A small map with enough twists and bends to make it interesting, and a few locked off locations that take more than a bit of ingenuity and perseverance to get into.

The puzzles are heavily clued. A bit too much for my taste. At least, that’s what I thought at first. I realised though, that trimming back the generous clues and hints would also dampen the slap-stick farcical mood.

There are a bunch of bugs to be found in the SeedComp version. Indeed, part of my enjoyment came from chasing them down and thinking of new ways to exploit them to fool the game and create little funny scenes of my own making. The game is strong enough under the hood so that the bugs become more something you might find in the “Amusing”-section after finishing an adventure.

“Have you tried…”

Mind you, the bugs are naught but a small raisin in this wonderful fruitcake of a game. The tone is continuously funny, not (only) by cracking jokes but by the aforementioned layering of complications. The main NPC is a funny bloke to mess with, and the reactions of the unnamed townsfolk are a real treat.

Great fun. I laughed at my screen several times. Somewhat straining on my suspension of disbelief at times. Great puzzle collection.