Reviews by Rovarsson
Fantasy
View this member's profilePrevious | 21-30 of 51 | Next | Show All
Not-princesses all around!, June 4, 2021It all begins with a rather awkward protagonist to control: a pig (which can alledgedly sniff out wizards...) Since pigs walk on four feet and have no opposable thumbs, a lot of commands are thrown out the window by nature of the PC. And although pigs are known to be very clever animals by those who study them (pigycists?), this particular pig does seem to rise even above normal intelligence levels of other members of the species Sus scrofa. For one thing, it can read...
Seeing that this smart pig is somewhat limited in the handiness department, it must find other ways to further its goals. Cue NPCs. By virtue of an excellent grasp of human psychology, our protagonist-pig can manipulate the other characters into following it around and it nudges them to interact with objects or other characters through very deliberately SNIFFing of pieces of the surroundings. Different characters will act upon this sniffing in different ways, according to their nature.
One of the pig's major ways to solve puzzles is therefore to choose the right NPC to come along and do the hands-on work. Instead of switching between PCs with their special abilities, here our pig-protagonist has to switch between NPC accomplices. The way this is handled in-game is both elegant and hilarious.
The puzzles flow seamlessly from the story and the setting. Some of them are pig-adjusted variations on standard adventure-fare, while others are truly surprising and original.
The writing is fresh and crisp, with a truly great comedic touch. There is lots of physical slapstick comedy, but at least as much of the humour comes from the pig's observations of the humans. Our pig always keeps a certain distance and so can easily see through the notions about identity the NPCs have about themselves.
Through these observations and the development of the story, what started as a laugh-out-loud comedy evolves into a character-driven drama by the finale. The Aesop that becomes clear near the end could have been cliché and heavy-handed, but the lightness and subtlety of the writing lifts it far above a finger-waving moral-of-the-story.
Truly one of the greatest games I have ever played.
Heroic character put to the test..., June 2, 2021On the surface, Magic Realms; Sword of Kasza is a nice but not too memorable oldschool quest. After being framed for the murder of the King's messenger, you escape and learn that the evil Rerex has reawakened. His first plan was to possess the magistrate of your town and let him throw you in jail to get you out of the way, for you have been foretold to be "The Chosen One".
But now you are free! After proving your worth to the king, you are sent on a quest to recover the fabled "Sword of Kasza".
The map is interesting. Five magical realms are accessible from a single convenient hub-junction. Each realm holds part of the Magical Sword or some wisdom to be gained or a foe to be vanquished in order to get closer to Rerex. The realms are self-contained puzzle areas. You do have to bring your backpack with you upon entering each one, but everything needed to advance in the game is in the realm itself. (The reason you need your backpack is to avoid the inventory limit and, more importantly, to have your beef jerky with you, should you get hungry...)
Sword of Kasza is fairly light on puzzles. Most are straight from the old build-your-own-adventure box for beginners. There is a code-breaking puzzle which left me scratching my head even after checking the walkthrough. And there is one truly fun variation on the distract-the-guards theme (although not that original).
There is a great and deceptively simple solution to getting into the king's castle. It relies on the player truly imagining what to do in the PC's place.
Instead of more intricate puzzles, the game relies more on the player finding the appropriate actions to trigger story-events. Sometimes these have a great dynamic effect (talking to the right NPC opens up a whole new set of locations), sometimes they are not so well executed (you have to SIT to advance the story...)
Nearing the endgame, there are some rather nice action-sequences. The text here is timed for dramatic effect, and although it may be too slow for some, I enjoyed this.
So far, a run-of-the-mill oldschool fantasy adventure that would not stand out among the hundreds of others of its kind.
The true strength of Magic Realms; Sword of Kasza lies in its completely new approach to player-immersion. Getting the player to forget she is playing a game was an explicitly stated goal of the Infocom Imps.
Authors have tried different ways to absorb the player in their stories. Some weave a story so breathtaking the player cannot help but be moved by the characters' fate. Some go to extreme lengths in building a detailed fictional world to mentally transport the player there. One step further, they might try to achieve a near-perfect simulation where almost every possible action the player thinks of is accounted for.
Here, the author takes a different path into the player's mind. Since interactive fiction is a textual medium, and players of interactive fiction may on average be considered to be more sensitive to language and writing than mere mortals, author James Malette decided to emulate the hardships of the questing hero in the player's experience through the cunning use of linguistic torture.
The most brutal yet least sophisticated example is the simple misspelling. "Messenger" becomes "messager". "Corridor" becomes "corrdior". These are the blunt-force weapons used to make the player feel the Hero's pain.
Of course, multiples of these can be joined together in a single sentence to act as a textual cluster-bomb. Consider this example:
> "This area has a fense inclosing a large field where horses are glazing."
A well-chosen rearrangement of letters in a single word can give new meaning, baffling the reader:
> "The village of Moon has been destoryed by the hand of Rerex!"
Far beyond mere destruction, we are facing a villain who can wipe a village from the story with a handwave!
More subtle than these are the slowly grating "mistakes" that get under the player's skin, making shouting at the screen or even throwing the computer against the nearest wall a real possibility.
> "You're" is "your". Every single time.
> Plural nouns become "noun's". Almost every time.
> The English past tense is written by gluing "-ed" to the verb. Just enough so it catches you by surprise every time.
The foulest weapon of all in this linguistic arsenal though is the dreaded "Seemingly Random Semicolon". It can show up in an innocent list of objects where, although painful, it is at least obviously out of place. It also rears its head in the middle of a descriptive paragraph, forcing the player to doubt her interpretation and reread the offensive sentence over and over, each time with a different emphasis. A truly haunting experience.
> "Beware the traps within, for amany bold knight entered; none never returned."
With this masterpiece I leave you to ponder the power of text, and text alone, to inflict harm upon the player comparable to the harm we put our protagonists through when exploring interactive fictional worlds.
Duke Alaric dukes it out with the trolls., May 20, 2021It had been a long time since I ventured into Hecate, the land of Alaric Blackmoon. I was immediately drawn back in. I love the high-on-questing/low-on-magic surroundings. Alaric is a down-to-earth veteran who got appointed Duke for saving Hecate in the first game, Axe of Kolt. Since then he has been roaming the lands to help his people where he can.
In The Lost Children the children of Hecate are being kidnapped by the trolls, who are normally friendly commercial partners. Might there be some magical coercion behind their changed behavior?
The story of The Lost Children is standard but great fun. Alaric goes on a straightforward, unironic quest to save the missing children, solving problems and puzzles on his way. The first area, west of the Fireheart Mountains, involves two fetch-quests. One is particularly weird/hilarious. The mother of one of the missing children has information Alaric needs, but she demands that he fix her leaking roof first. The fact that she's an Elf who knows through a psychic connection that her son is alive and well might help explain her warped priorities, but still...
The puzzles here range from the very simple find-object-use-object kind to more elaborate obstacles where our hero must obtain the right information first and go through a multi-step plan to get what he needs.
It is during one of these fetch-quests that the player encounters a magnificent puzzle where they have to take stock of their inventory, the geography of multiple locations and make a mental leap that would come natural for a playing child. The moment it clicks is fantastic. ((Spoiler - click to show)Skipping into the cave across the cove.
The area east of the mountains offers a whole other set of obstacles. Here Alaric comes face to face with the trolls and must find ways to deceive, kill or in some other way go around them. There is certainly some learn-by-dying involved in the endgame, where the player has to figure out which steps to take and then restore and execute those steps in as few moves as possible, or else be caught by trolls or pulverized by wizard-fire. In a game as proudly oldschool as this one, I had not one bit of a problem with that.
The problems with <iThe Lost Children mostly lie in a lack of gatekeeping between the two areas. It is exceedingly easy to move through the tunnels under the Fireheart Mountains to the valley of the trolls from which there is no return, and only then notice that you lack a necessary object to kill the ogre.
Indeed, there are many, many ways to get the game into walking-dead terrain. Too many. That's a shame, because the good oldschool features (I learned to like a well-thought-through try-die-repeat puzzle) of the game threaten to be buried under the frustration that comes with too many restores and lack of clues and guidance.
I enjoyed playing through this game with a massive amount of hints and explicit help. Without that, I would recommend playing another Alaric Blackmoon-game like Die Feuerfaust instead.
Funny Demonic Nunnery., April 21, 2021The nuns of the nigh impenetrable Nunnery of Blood have taken your mother. Against all odds and the other demons' advice, you will infiltrate it and free your mother.
First off: a bit of tech stuff.
The adjustable interface is pretty nifty. You can toggle all of the player conveniences. Old-fashioned purist that I am, I chose to turn off the side panes (which show exits, inventory and interactive objects in the room), the auto-map (which is cool, by the way) and the keyword links (I find the blue highlighting distracting and hey, I'm playing a parser game!)
The room description-layout is very basic: first a dry list of exits, objects and characters, followed by the actual room description. Any special action taken is listed even before the exits-and-objects list, but the circumstances and consequences of that action are only described after the room. This basic (default Quest?) layout cuts up the flow of the narrative into discrete chunks.
The writing itself is very good though. It captures the locations efficiently (a dank cellar, a smelly cottage,...). The NPCs are very nicely characterized. As they are mostly means to be used for solving puzzles, the attention mostly goes to their relevant physical features, but there's always a hint at their deeper personalities.
Overall, a playful and mischievous tone pervades the game.
Basilica de Sangre takes place on a small, condensed map, making the most of the limited number of locations and avoiding to send the player on long unnecessary walks.
The puzzles hinge on an original main mechanism. The author has struck a good balance between using this mechanism and incorporating some more traditional text-adventure puzzles to support it.
I mustn't elaborate too much. Suffice it to say that it's always a good idea to take note of where the NPCs are, what they are carrying and to read the (short) conversations attentively.
A very pleasant little game!
Cave crawling Ambassador, April 18, 2021After three weeks as a guest of the Northland Empire, you've had it with these carefully guided official visits and tours designed to show you absolutely nothing of what is really going on in the land. Fortunately, due to a small mishap during an elephant tour, which you had nothing to do with of course, you get an opportunity to search around your lodgings and sniff out the secrets they do not want you to know.
And soon you find the entrance to a cave...
The Meteor, The Stone and a Long Glass of Sherbet sets itself firmly in Zorkian territory. It's a classic and very well done cave-crawl with some explicit references to the caves of Zork.
As soon as you enter the cave halls, you are welcomed by an overwhelming view. Truly one of the most surprising cave-descriptions I have read so far. From here, you explore a small but exquisitely crafted map. There are many differences in level, and you have to be very resourceful to get up or down from one to the other. I prefer this over a 100-room NESW sprawler any day.
The puzzles are clever without being too hard.
A few depend on unusual object-manipulation, many need you to learn a simple magic system with spells that just happen to be tailor-made for the problems you encounter.
I had the strong impression that the author did have a particular order of traversal in mind. If you should skip one of the early locations, choosing to explore deeper first, the puzzles become a lot harder to understand.
The intro and the first part of the midgame are very relaxed, getting the player to trust the game that they can explore and experiment at their leisure. And then Zarfian cruelty strikes. I won't elaborate, but just watch you inventory, okay?
There's a nice shift in pace in the endgame, where you need to make your escape by making a mental *click* to know how to behave under the new circumstances.
A cool game that leans on the cave-crawling tropes and uses them in fun and surprising ways.
(Dis-) Illusions, April 13, 2021This game was a lot better when I played it ten years ago. Or is it I who have come to expect better?
Wearing the Claw is a very traditional fantasy adventure. It's played completely straight. No tongue in cheek, no subtle (or blatant) irony.
I really like traditional fantasy played straight. A lot.
After "The Testing", you are chosen as the worthy young man to find the Pendant of MacGuffin, ahem, Elinor, to lift the curse beset upon your village by an evil wizard. You are to gain entry to the Fortress where it is held and bring it back. No objections from me here. More than half the fantasy stories and games I know start off like this.
But then the game falls short on many points.
Apart from a longish text dump-introduction and a similarly long epilogue, the actual story is hurried. There's not enough attention to tempo to let the player sink into the story or the character. Everything seems to happen one thing after another at the same just-a-bit-too-fast pace.
The view of the magical island across the sea raised expectations that weren't fulfilled. After a literally linear path (one east-west dusty road) I had hoped for the map to open up and become more complex upon entering the fortress. Instead I found one north-south path.
The first puzzle sets a good theme. It's about deception, and one hopes that this will be explored more fully in the rest of the game. The other puzzles do indeed repeat the theme, but they do not widen it. They're similar variations on the theme without becoming more difficult or complicated. As such, they also do not become more rewarding, rather the opposite.
The story itself has the same problem. If only it had broadened in scope to weigh some of the personal or moral implications of deception... Perhaps by adding alternative ways to overcome the obstacles...
Maybe your character could also have become a more three-dimensional person then.
But these are "if"s and "maybe"s that cannot be changed.
The game as it is still has its good qualities. It's competently written. It has a ton of optional responses to unnecessary actions. You can greatly add to the fun in this game by trying many things that are outside of the main quest.
There is a magical gadget that changes the way you view the world, so there's some fun in re-exploring there.
All in all, this is a fine, uncomplicated adventure. It's just that it seems to promise so much more...
Iterations of a snowy day., April 10, 2021Wintervale starts off as a run-of-the mill story about a fantasy town. This introduction was nicely done, with a history of how the town got its name and a list of the different fantasy races living together in Wintervale, listing their strengths. Apparently, the town is special for having all these races living together, as they are mistrusting towards each other in the neighbouring lands. Unfortunately, this information is of no consequence to the rest of the story.
The innkeeper of the town goes down to his drinking hall to investigate after he was rudely awakened by riotous noises in the streets. During this first investigation he is killed, only to re-awaken on the same day.
From here, the circumstances of the innkeeper's investigations turn darker and more confusing. Through multiple re-awakenings, the player must guide him on a search for what exactly is happening.
The game is written with a lot of enthousiasm, and I felt this pull me along while playing. I was gripped by the mystery of the broken glass in the tavern and the riot outside.
I must add however that the sense of mystery was helped (?) along by the unclear writing. The game is riddled with awkward turns of phrase that present your surroundings as more obscure than the author probably intended.
There are also many misspellings ("environment" is consistently spelled "enviornment" for example). The game definitely needs another round of proofreading by players fluent in English.
I liked Wintervale a lot, but perhaps more for the promise it shows than for the story it is in this iteration...
Ten Pearly Isles, March 21, 2021The Lost Islands of Alabaz is a fun and energetic travel-adventure. It's aimed at children and has the feel of the "boy's adventures"-books I used to eat up by the dozens as a child. (For all I knew then, girls had books about knitting and princes. Except for my cool girlfriends, who also read the boy's books... Sign of the times...?)
At the beginning of the story, you get to choose a name for your protagonist, which was a great draw-in for my son. We decided on his own name. After that, he let me do all the hard work and asked about status-reports on his quest each evening.
There is a detailed tutorial in the game in the form of Trig, your best friend NPC. He breaks the fourth wall to tell the player directly what to TYPE. Children playing their first IF might not notice, but for a veteran with several dozen games under my belt, having read numerous threads and essays about Player-PC-Narrator-Parser-relations this made me feel unbalanced at first. I concluded that the aforementioned essays were taking things much too seriously...)
One morning, you, a young knight, are called by the king to go on a quest. The ten islands of the kingdom have been separated by a cursed mist for dozens of years now and there is no sign that it will lift of its own accord. The people are suffering under the lack of trade, food and communication with friends and relatives.
The king gives you one magic pearl to guide you through the mist to one island. From there, you're on your own. Find the cause of the curse and lift it, and find your way back home.
Not the most innovative of premises, but an engaging one. I did feel an obligation to fulfill this quest for the good of all the island-dwellers of Alabaz. (And to my son...)
The premise of the ten islands makes for a great sense of space. You're a seafaring adventurer exploring the unknown!
The islands themselves all have small maps (five locations or less, except for the mazy one...) At first, I thought the author was using a Gateway-like technique, each island a self-contained puzzle-space in the bigger whole. The first islands of The Lost Islands of Alabaz are like this. The more islands you have encountered and explored though, the more it becomes necessary to revisit previous islands, making for a web of relations between the islands that has to be kept in mind.
The puzzles themselves are easy to medium difficulty.Most of them are simple fetch-quests and/or straightforward use-appropriate-object-here obstacles. To get them right however, the player needs to pay close attention to the information he's given in conversations and in the out-of-game Almanac.
That's right! With your download, you get an Almanac about the islands and how they were before the mist. It's a nice 15-minute read, almost like an historical tourist-brochure. Embedded of course are many clues on how to solve the problems in the game.
Actually, the Almanac is just one of three hint-systems for the game. You also carry a journal, in which your progress is recorded along with reminders of puzzles you have yet to solve. And there is Trig. You can ask Trig about all the puzzles, repeatedly. He will start with giving you a nudge toward the first step of the solution, and give more explicit guidance after that.
There are a whole bunch of NPCs to whom you can talk. I found them to be well-characterized with a few strokes of the pen. They talk about many things, and to avoid confusion the author puts suggested topics that pertain directly to the puzzles between parentheses. All conversations use the syntax TALK ABOUT, although you can use ASK ABOUT too. I didn't find any differences.
The Lost Islands of Alabaz plays very smoothly. There are many synonyms for nouns and verbs. The descriptions change in tune with the actions you perform on other islands, there are nice responses to "failed" attempts. The player can feel at ease that the game will not misbehave.
This game turned out to be a lot longer than I expected from the first play-session where I breezed through the first two islands. I spent a few evenings on this quest for the hidden magic pearls. Very enjoyable evenings.
Light adventurous fun. Go play.
Oh, as an extra incentive: You can compete in the Zeppelipede-racing Derby on the Island of RazzMaTazz! Yes, you can. In fact, you must!
Our favourite generic hero saves cultural heritage!, March 18, 2021When I entered the first room in The Adventurers' Museum, I almost breathed a sigh of relief. It was a breath of fresh air to learn that the quest at hand was to retrieve all the exhibits that were stolen from the museum by a thievish imp. Through the actions of my anonymous adventurer, I was going to help restore the historical artefacts of the Necromancer-wars to their rightful place, for the good of future generations of schoolchildren and curious adults. My sociopathic and cleptomaniac tendencies would serve a greater cause.
I'm only half joking here. Although the gameplay of The Adventurers' Museum is the same as any old puzzle-&-looting romp, the task given to me by the old and wize curator of the museum had more importance, more weight than just treasure-taking to kill the Big Bad Bully at the end.
In his review for Baf's Guide, David Welbourn says: "Want to play Zork I again for the nostalgia value, but you've already played that one so many times that it's no longer a challenge? Try The Adventurers' Museum."
I haven't played Zork yet, but I have read enough to know that if you are eaten by a Growl in the dark and if your treasure gets randomly stolen by a thieving imp, I might as well view this game as a rehearsal for when I do tackle Zork.
The technical side of this adventure is more than adequate. There are many synonyms for verbs and nouns. Trying "wrong" things usually gives a response either why you can't do that or just lets you do them and see the funny consequences of your actions (plus it moves the game into unwinnable territory, but hey, save/restore right?)
There are several really oldschool features to this game, but it's as if the author put them in out of respect for past tradition rather than to make gameplay harder.
There's a limited lantern, but there's also an unlimited light source lying right on your path. Your hero gets thirsty, but a river runs right through the cave. You feel hungry, but the curator gave you elvish waybread on your third turn into the game. The imp keeps stealing your stuff, but you can get him off your scent quite easily.
The only thing left that can be annoying to (modern) players is the inventory-juggling, but all that does is make you take a trip back to the museum now and then.
It's probably best to put any frustrations aside and do a few exploratory runthroughs of the cave without worrying about unwinnability or the order of puzzles, just until you get a feel for the place.
Coming back to the Zork-comparison: I have also read enough that I think The Adventurers' Museum really has a special mood of its own. There is a very consistent, almost friendly fairytale-fantasy atmosphere throughout the entire game (except that one room...).
I found the layout and the feel of the map to be brilliant. The cramped cave-crawling of the cave entrance soon gives way to grand vistas of splendid underground halls, a fluorescent flower garden and subterranean pools. A nice big part of the map is accessible from the start, and already in this part the gamespace is layered in three dimensions, with sidepaths leading up and over other areas. Sometimes you get treated to an eagle-eye view of a lower area.
Puzzlewise, there is a wide variety. There's attentive exploring and spelunking, some references to pop-culture, clever time/turn counting,... And yes, sometimes violence is the answer.
Some solutions do require a completely (to me) unmotivated action, and at least one object has a use that was completely unhinted. A bit of let's-try-every-verb and see what happens. That was less fun...
The pacing of the game can be a bit tedious at first. Once you have explored the accessible map though, a nice interaction between puzzles solved, museum-objects in your inventory and bottlenecks opening sets a cascade in motion where you find tunnel after cavern after hall with treasure in rapid succession. Very rewarding.
Conversations are not implemented at all, so you only get to know the few NPCs by their actions and what they choose to say to you. I did find the old curator endearing. (And a bit intimidating. How can he get from his office to the top of the museum stairs to block your way so fast!?)
The Adventurers' Museum may not be innovative or especially creative, but I had a great time playing it.
Fluffy adventure., March 12, 2021A Bear's Night Out is a delightful little adventure!
After dark, while your owner is asleep, you climb (or rather bounce) out of bed. You have to make sure everything is ready for the big day tomorrow, and knowing your owner, he'll have forgotten a bunch of stuff.
The map is very small, eleven rooms in total. While exploring these rooms, there are tons of fun stuff to discover and experiment with.(Pssst, the cat is a great playmate...)
Once you have seen all the rooms, experimented to your hearts content with all the funny stuff and start dealing with the puzzles in earnest, you'll see that not everything in this game is fluffy and soft and easygoing. None of the puzzles are fiendish, but they all require thorough examining of the game-space, a good deal of planning and some real-life puzzlesolving strategies. Of course, all of this is made both harder and more fun by the fact that you're about a foot tall...
A warm and fuzzy adventure.
Previous | 21-30 of 51 | Next | Show All