Ratings and Reviews by Henck

The Colour Pink is an old-fashioned text adventure game, filled with puzzles, all of which are fairly straightforward. Fiddle with machines, give and receive items, buy and exchange in a shop, that sort of thing. The game has an interesting story with seven different endings. Some of these depend on endgame choices, while some endings are opened up by your actions in the middle of the game. The writing is consistently okay, though the text tends to tell you how you feel about a location, rather than letting the scene speak for itself. There are a number of NPCs you can speak to through a multiple choice system, which can be gone through exhaustively so you won't miss any conversation options.

This game was a competition entry and not very large, but the author has clearly put a lot of work into it. I would very much like Robert Street to apply lessons learned in developing this game in a future game. Here is a map for The Colour Pink.

Uncle Zebulon's Will is an excellent puzzly adventure game. It takes about an hour to solve it and the ending leaves the player wanting more (it also hints at a future sequel that never materialized, unfortunately). The game contains only 12 locations, something that you're even told when giving the SCORE command, so you know how much there is left to explore, and each of those locations are well described. The world is static: there are no NPCs to speak of, save one which isn't more than a door guard, and the author uses room descriptions to describe what isn't in the room rather than what is, but manages to create a great atmosphere.

In this short game, there are few puzzles to solve, but they are all interesting and go beyond the find this, give that variety. There's a bit of searching, some transmutation and some mythology (which requires no previous knowledge on the part of the player). It does feel like the author grabbed themes from a rather mixed back, combining remote magical worlds with classical mythology, but then the game is so short that it would be hard to tie it all together into a more coherent story.

The game offers a few quality-of-life niceties: in some rooms, when you go into a direction you can't go, the game will helpfully tell you where you can go. There is also a hint system that is part of the game world (as opposed to a HINTS command). Finally, room descriptions change when things happen in the room. These are things you'll find in smaller games (although I'd love to see them in a game of any size) and they work well.

Gateway is a breath of fresh air after so many games filled with sorcerers and trolls, taking place as it does in an interesting science fiction environment. Based on the work of Frederik Pohl of the same name (1977) - the reading of which is not required - it has a rich background, making the story and the room descriptions that much more interesting.

Like other Legend games (Spellcasting 101, Eric the Unready), Gateway has static graphics that accompany the text. Sometimes, the graphics show (larger) objects than can be manipulated and are then removed from the image. There are also occasionally unobtrusive animation, like flashing lights. Every turn you take advances the game by five minutes, allowing the story to present time-based events: a certain actor appears in a certain place only around midnight, for example.

Gateway was released in 1992. As such, if offers much more text than adventure games released a few years earlier, but still suffers from a terrible puzzle or two (there is a maze). Other puzzles are more interesting, and they can all be understood after you've solved them.