Reviews by Rovarsson

Impressionistic prose bordering on poetry. Sensuous associations brought on by a gently touching finger. Images of kissing lips and dripping blood.

Footnotes. A second voice. Harsher, more direct. Longing too, silent confessions of love and yearning. Tenderness in the face of fate's inevitability.

The gun or the knife?

But beauty prevails. Beauty offset by pain and secrets. Still, beauty. Enhanced by the acceptance of the ugly things. The things unspoken yet known.

The silver lining of the shining blade-edge.

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.

(This review is based on the SeedComp version of the game.)

After a period of 737 cycles in deep Sleep Mode, the Core of Reconstruction Facility 05 (RF-05-C1) awakens. Time to resume its mission: prepare the planet for the return of the humans.

The Core is the conscious, volitional, self-reflective AI of a terraforming and restoratory facility. It has control over several subsystems which carry out the practical tasks needed to further the overall goals it sets.

Each cycle, the Core gets a report about the previous time period. Based on that, it can adjust its priorities to guide the subconscious systems through the next cycle.

That’s the practical side of things in a nutshell. Providing a home planet minimally capable of supporting human life. The player gets to decide what to focus on and sees the results in the next cycle-report.

Since the Core’s target population is humans, it is also fed tidbits of information about human history and culture by its subconscious Memory database. These consist of seemingly random fragments, some from literary masterpieces, some from more mundane sources. This is a built-in attempt from its makers to teach the AI about human aesthetics, morality, society,… Hopefully, when the humans return, they will come to a world which is tailored to their sensitivities in these less tangible areas of human experience.

The player gets to read these cultural sources from the perspective of a non-discerning AI. This produces a shift away from her preconceptions about quality or value of the sources. A fragment from Homeros’ Oddyssey (Be still, my heart…) might the next waking cycle be juxtaposed with a Wikipedia article about beans ( Bean - Wikipedia). [Neither of these are actually in the game text.]

During the sleep cycle, it seems that the AI is agitatedly trying to incorporate, re-organise and assimilate the information about humanity in its memory base. It does this in dreams. The dreams are not directly related to the information the Core received in the previous waking cycle. Instead they are more like contextless floating memory snippets, short stories told in simple sentences, or free associations of words and concepts.

I played through the game twice, with opposite strategies (aggressive <-> accomodating toward wildlife which may damage the base, reaching-out <-> self-sustaining toward other terraforming facilities that may be out there). Both times my efforts were fruitless and my facility was terminally damaged, unable to carry out its objectives.
There are many options to tweak the facility’s attitude toward the surroundings. I have not (yet) found a succesfull combination, but I will definitely keep looking. (EDIT: Failure is inevitable)

The most intriguing parts of the game to me were the cultural fragments and the dream-sequences. Sadly, those were also the parts where I found the game most lacking. I would have liked to see more of the personal development the AI goes through in response to its growing experience with human culture and its own growing mind.

A very interesting game, and one I hope the author will expand upon.

Meet Sub-Lieutenant of Human Resources Command Sheryl Swift.
Sheryl is punctual, tidy, scrupulously hygienical, and conscientious about her work. All good personal qualities, no?
She diligently organises and leads the weekly staff meetings, preferably during friday-noon lunch break. She sternly believes those beneath one on the societal ladder should be cared for with a firm guiding hand. That’s important work, no?
Recently, Sheryl was promoted to the free-standing cubicle closest to her boss 's Lieutenant’s office. Even though he never asks her in, it's a sign that she’s worthy of her position, no?
The Lieutenant himself even calls her to take care of an urgent matter in the office. On a friday evening. Minutes before she would leave her desk, put on her coat and go home. That’s firm proof of his trust in her, no?

Against a tumultuous futuristic backdrop, we follow Sheryl as she searches the Human Resources Command offices for a number of missing chapters for the new draft of His Majesty Smurg IV’s Royal Space Navy Service Handbook. Lieutenant Fernandez wants them sent through that same evening. A menial clerk’s job it would seem, but Sheryl performs it with pride and ingenuity. While we see glimpses of the Space Navy fighter fleet in action through the window, Sheryl just as dutifully does her part for the smooth operation of the Human Resources department of His Majesty’s Space Navy.

His Majesty’s Royal Space Navy Service Handbook utilises a limited and efficient verb set, which it vehemently insists upon when it is strayed from. In contrast, the surroundings are richly implemented. Descriptions of objects provide deeper layers of detail and they often include nuggets of characterisation for Sheryl or clues about her co-workers who misplaced the missing chapters of His Majesty’s Royal Space Navy Service Handbook.

While at first it may seem that there is a bit too much handholding in solving the problems, we must realise that His Majesty’s Royal Space Navy Service Handbook chooses to exchange some player satisfaction or puzzle-glory for a smoother flow of the story and better control of the tempo. This makes for a more engaging story.

Sheryl is a beautifully drawn character. I will remember her for the next XYZZY Awards.

One of these days I'll have to publish A Wanderer's Guide to the Mansions of TextAdventureLand. I will have to wade through this towering stack of notes and edit them down to a manageable volume though.
Haunted mansions, Alchemist's mansions, Vampire's mansions, mansions left to you in the will of your late (and pleasantly unhinged) uncle,...

McMurphy's Mansion falls in that last category. A pressing telegram urges you to Scotland, where you shall inherit your Uncle McMurphy's estate and 10.000.000 pounds. On one condition...

Find the twelve gold bars scattered around the grounds and solve the final puzzle...

Copyrighted in 1984, McMurphy's Mansion is magnificently old-school.

(EDIT: The original version for C64 was released in '84 or '85. The game was ported to DOS in 1987 and 1989. I played the 1989 version.)

IF conventions were not as firmly established, and this game has its own idiosyncracies regarding commands anyhow.
AGAIN is shortened to R (repeat) instead of G. DROP ALL works, but you have to TAKE FEE, TAKE FI, TAKE FO, TAKE FUM instead of TAKE ALL.
X is short for EXAMINE, as usual. Large objects can be examined immediately, but the game refuses to let you examine take-able items unless you are carrying them.
I works for INVENTORY (no messing with INV), MAP shows you the room layout of the mansion (no map for the outdoors), XMAP turns off the layout and snorts that real adventures make a paper map anyway.

It took a while before I fully put my trust in the game. Opening and looking in cabinets, for example, give responses so dry (contrary to the vividness of the rest of the world) that I was unsure if anything had changed in the underlying world model. It was not necessary to be mistrusting. The game and its engine under the hood are indeed solid.

Uncle McMurphy's will of course is just the pretext to drop the player in an unabashed puzzlefest.
There are a number of code-breaking tasks. These are probably the most logical of the batch. A few puzzles present a surprising application of common sense and everyday physics. A lot more rely on mental associations and not-so-straightforward intuitive leaps.
However, because the game is set in our normal (for an undefined value of the term) non-magical world, even the least logical puzzles have handholds in real life experience.

Most of the progress through the game, finding necessary items, comes from thoroughly exploring and investigating the game-world. And yes, this means copious amounts of LOOKing IN, UNDER and BEHIND stuff. Fortunately, there is no need for lawnmowering every location with these commands. Either it's clear that any curious investigator would look in, under or behind a certain piece of scenery, or a clue found elsewhere will explicitly tell you to do it.

The map itself is a joy to explore. Almost all of it is open from the get-go, allowing you to roam freely around the gardens and the house, noting interesting or questionable features and remembering where the various locations are in relation to each other. (Yes, this will be important.)
Another joyous idiosyncratic implementation feature is the use of L N (or any direction) in a room with a window to get a detailed description of the view. This knits the world together and joins the inside of the house and the outdoors lawns and trees into one continuous space. (It also provides clues. Read carefully, they may appear only once...)
From boldly exploring the edges of the map, it becomes apparent that the author was no big fan of death in adventures. Upon falling from great height (or some other accident), there is a humorous paragraph detailing your injuries and you are brought back to the house. In the original game, the player also got a 1-minute penalty where no commands would be accepted by the game, effectively freezing the protagonist out.

McMurphy's Mansion stands out among its mansionate peers by the liveliness of its world. You repeatedly bump into the butler, whom you also see walking around the yard through the windows. The many trees and flowers provide the pleasant distraction of nature's beauty, and you can even get a glimpse of the nearby moors on the other side of the estate wall, if you look out the right window.

A splendid old school treasure hunt.