Ratings and Reviews by Rovarsson

The Bony King of Nowhere is not a good game. It's clumsily written, with descriptions that somehow manage to be short and rambling at the same time. The tone shifts unstably between overwrought attempts at humour and heroic fantasy played straight.
The author unevenly shook a big bag of capital letters over the Objects in the game, so they are all capitalised. Except when they're not. A bunch of apostrophes mutinied and decided to pick all the wrong "itses" to go hang out.
The way the location descriptions are printed is wonky, with one half of the text on top, the automatic object listing in between and another few lines of description underneath.

It took stamina and dedication to power through instead of throwing it aside after the first few rooms.

And yet...

Underneath the clumsy wonky wobbly writing there is actually the scaffolding of a decent fantasy adventure quest.
The map is small and seemingly straightforward, but it has enough twists and turns to make it interesting. Similarly, the puzzles come across as simple, but most have a little hindrance or extra step that gives them the necessary satisfaction value.

And the inclusion of NPC Gerald the Heroic Mouse is a stroke of brilliance.

Oh, if only the author had sent this through a few more rounds of testing, and sat down at the writing desk a while longer...

Finally! The archeological researchers must have realised they couldn't understand this thing by themselves. After three months in the brigg, you get a chance to analyse this alien machine yourself. Under close supervision of course...

The Weapon is essentially a complicated puzzle box. Lots of buttons, a few technogadgets, a sequence of actions to figure out. On the surface, the puzzles are not that hard to figure out. It's just that, between the exact order of commands and the annoying presence of your supervisor, there's always a few extra complications to deal with first.

The descriptions of the surroundings are finetuned to the purpose of the game: clear, easy to visualise, no distractions or red herrings. There's a bit of colour in the alien aesthetic of the room, and the outer-space setting is hinted at without requiring further investigation. Although it's not necessary to talk at length with the NPC, the conversation tidbits do lend a bit of characterisation and context.
Even though it's a difficult balance to avoid giving the player too much information in a game like this, I would have liked a bit more exposition and backstory. It would have helped the emotional engagement with my PC.

Looking a bit deeper than the puzzle box at the surface, taking the at first minimally understood premise into account, The Weapon plays a subtle game with the different levels of knowledge about the situation of the NPC, the PC, and the player.

The game's subtitle is "An Interactive Misdirection". This is clearly implied in the relation and conversation between NPC and PC at the start of the game. The protagonist must keep progress on the machine hidden from the supervisor, lest the research is halted once the NPC figures out too much by herself.

But it also holds true in the relation between PC and player. The player is moving forward half-blind, motivated in-game by the vague objective of the PC, and out-of-game by the wish to solve the game's puzzles. This leads to her being led to an unsuspected (at least for the first half of the game) outcome. The twist was both simpler and more surprising than I had anticipated, even when it's obvious from the beginning that the goals of PC and NPC do not align.

A very clever game of NPC- and player-manipulation, manifesting itself on different levels of understanding.

Having a huge number of followers is great when you're the prophet of a new religion, but all those people tend to get hungry and grumpy at some point. Sadly, sermons don't sate their bodily appetites.

Playing as Jesus Himself, in The Bread and the Fishes it falls upon you to provide the five thousand believers who have gathered on the shore of lake Gennesaret with food. While you're at it, you might as well grab the chance to heal some sick, wounded or disabled people.

The author thought it funny to portray the relation between Jesus and God as an irreverent father-son buddies friendship, filled with informal speech and anachronisms. Not that this bothered me, I just didn't think it was funny.

Overall, the game is well-implemented and detailed. It has a pleasant atmosphere throughout, with nicely written locations and characters. The puzzles are mostly easy and straightforward, except for one mathematical problem which, allthough not too hard, is a bit of a bore and doesn't fit the tone at all.

An attempt at a funny riff on the miracle of the bread and the fish, not always successful. The mythological gravitas of this bible-episode is completely stripped away, and the jokes are not good enough to fill the gap. Even then, a pleasant way to spend an hour or so.

In Hibernated 1, the protagonist Olivia got some much-needed help in navigating the spaceship from a native extermination robot. Eight Feet Under follows this robot, nicknamed Vlad, during four separate slice-of-life episodes.

Each episode is short and self-contained, centering on one main puzzle. There is definitely some preparatory exploration and map-drawing needed to get a good view of the problem and the available resources, but once that is done, the solutions are pretty straightforward and logical. Central to a lot of the (sub)puzzles is the arsenal of modules of various functions that Vlad is equipped with.

The maps are quite small, but when put next to each other, and especially when combined with the map of the Hibernated 1 main game, they hint at the enormous size of the spaceship, with many specialised areas.They are not intentionally confusing, but there are enough corners and forks in the path to make navigation just a bit tricky.

Allthough the protagonist is a robotic extermination unit, there are some basic emotions and character traits that emerge through the game. Or perhaps it's just that we humans like to anthropomorphise our gadgets... I felt that for its destructive purpose and the built-in weapons, Vlad seemed very loyal and lonely, in need of "masters" to feel secure and valued.

Especially the final vignette, where Vlad goes unnoticed on a mission that would leave Olivia stranded in the void, gave the impression of a self-sacrificing effort to rescue the new masters.

On the implementation front, the game falls somewhere between a retro-adventure and a full fledged modern parser. Multi-word commands are possible, but most of those follow the syntax USE X ON Y. This confused me a bit at first when I tried to ANALYZE or GRAB when I should USE ANALYZER or USE GRABBER. LOOK (L) is not recognised, instead the command is REDESCRIBE (R), which strengthens the retro-feel.
A lot of scenery objects (but by no means all) have a short description which helps flesh out the surroundings. However, performing an action upon these objects, or an invalid action on a takeable object, gets a generic non-helpful response. For a lot of necessary objects, though, helpful nudges are included.

A touching backstory about the life of a service robot that mostly has to be inferred from small crumbs and filled in by a human empathic mind. Entertaining puzzles and setting.

Our dearest foulmouthing lionhearted street urchin Lil' Ragamuffin is in trouble. Again. A gang of maffia goons with a serious case of stereotypicalitis want her pet rat to make money in the cage fights for them. Of course Ragamuffin isn't going to rest until she sets things straight frees her buddy.

In the usual style of the Guttersnipe-games, reaching the endgoal involves a bunch of interconnected far-fetched fetch-quests, each even sillier than the next. Still, once you get the hang of things, there is a certain warped logic to the kinds of solutions that work.

As with the previous installments, there are a lot of rough edges in The Baleful Backwash. Sorely missing obvious synonyms, a grating lack of customised responses, some typos and small bugs.

However, this adventure easily rises above those imperfections through the spontaneous fun it draws forth in the player.

Lil' Ragamuffin is an endearing character, but don't tell her that. You'd hurt her street-urchin's sense of pride. The other characters are walking dripping clichés, but in this style of game they are more than welcome. Their one-sided stupidity adds to the comedic atmosphere, and for cardboard cutouts, they have a surprising amount of things to say about each other and about the useful objects in the game. Ask them about anything you can think of, it'll greatly help you in figuring out what to use for which puzzle.

The map turned out bigger than I expected when going in. Not only were there more rooms, but the place also felt big and alive because of the elaborate moody descriptions of the locations.

The author uses a fast yet precise writing style, with many details singled out but all of it seen through the eyes of the main character. This makes it easy to sympathise with Ragamuffin and to share her outrage at her best friend being held captive.

And an outraged Lil' Ragamuffin is a joy to be around, as long as you're on her side.

Don't you hate it when you've let yourself be captured by your nemesis, got into his latest death-trap for his amusement (and that of the viewers), and he can't even afford you the courtesy of staying to watch and applaud your "certain death"?

Well, it happens at the beginning of Dynamite Powers vs. the Ray of Night. What follows are a series of delightfully pulpy escapades, each fully playing into the expected Bond/supervillain tropes while presenting an honest challenge at the same time.

Beneath the breathless location descriptions, the game is actually built very efficiently. Everything is elaborately described, but the rooms contain just the information and equipment necessary. No silver trinkets or red herrings to divert the attention.

Despite the jokingly over-the-top writing style, the puzzles are no laughing matter. Even with careful deduction, it's necessary to fail and restore a few times to gain essentiel bits of information to take into account.

The game cheerfully plays with the awkwardness of describing a "show" from a visual medium in the language of a text-adventure. Not only does this mismatch produce some comedic effect, the game derives its most challenging puzzle from it.

Very polished, the author did all the necessary work to account for the large number of possible combinations in the middle game.

Due to a slight misreading on my part, I managed to destroy my home planet in the endgame. Hopefully you won't.

It certainly is worth trying.

0.14 light years. That's all. At the speed of travel that would be like standing on the doorstep of the destination. Almost being able to extend a finger to ring the bell.

But no. The ship's computer decided being caught in an alien vessel's tractor beam is enough to wake me out of that sweet/nauseating comatose sleep...

Something must be really wrong.

Well, in Hibernated 1 (Director's Cut) there doesn't seem to be at first. My ship's alright, no leaking pipes or other damage. There is however a humongous alien ship looming over my front window. And over my rear airlock. And once I get to exploring it, big enough to be looming over quite an angle of visible spave from my point of view.

Let's say it's large.

Not only is it large, it's weird. I'm used to the nicely symmetrical dimensions of my own ship, but this alien one extends unexpectedly far in unnecessary directions...

The game-map of Hibernated follows a pragmatic, functional, straightforward plan. NESW. Except it encourages nautical directions to keept the player closer to the setting. I am always looking for the author's use of the map, the rooms and their connections. This is an element that can add a great deal of atmosphere to the writing of the descriptions.

Here, instead of using wriggly curving pathways, the author sticks to right angled F/SB/A/P -directions, but the difference between the familiar, symmetrical map of my "home"-spaceship and the alien ship is still enough to warp my directional feelings. Once I entered the alien ship and started drawing a map, everything seemed to be lopsided, heavy on one side.

This juxtaposition of symmetrical-lopsided ship design is strong enough to emphasise the difference between both ships.

But there is a shift that completely twists the mental image. A twist that makes it abundantly clear that these ships are hanging still (relative to one another) in vacuum space, that shows, once it *clicks*, hpw such masses behave in space.

Now, of course, there is no way I'm hunkering down in my own little ship. Exploring the alien ship however is tricky. It's set on "quarantine" mode, aso I have the dual task of finding out why the doors are locked and finding out how to cross those barriers.

A lot of these puzzles are quite straightforward variations on "find key; use key." However, at just the right locations (or just the right plot-beats), there are two puzzles.

One that is straightforward and one that is, well, straightforward... And stil they manage to stump the player's progress at just the right time.

Especially the second one of those straightforward puzzles manages to break the adventurer's expectations and elicit a gleeful "yay".

As mysterious as the background story begins, it's expected toward the end. I don't mean this in a bad way. Prometheus' effort to rejoice humanity deserves repetition. But this is a game worth more playing for those two puzzles. The backstory could become *story* with a rewrite.

Very engaging atmosphere, brilliant puzzles.