Reviews by Nomad

Warning: This is not a game, but rather a short story. Nothing to accomplish. I'd give it one star only usually, but...

It's amusing.

You should not be allergic to Greek mythology and cheap innuendos to enjoy it in a similar way. Especially not to cheap innuendos. It's a ten minute read, so there's nothing to lose here. It's trashy, but it has a heart.

EXODUS: Climate Activist is a CYOA game about a teenager finding his meaning in life by trying to join a militant environmental group. It plays like it was written by a teenager thinking he could find his meaning in life by trying to join a militant environmental group. Be a lone wolf! Get the hot chick anyway! Break out of your dull teenager life! Be a hero!

If you're a fan of Troma movies this might be a four star game for you. I'm not yet convinced it's satire so I'll give it two.

Bad Beer is a mixed bag - I enjoyed it a lot for reasons depicted below, and I found it to be inferior due to reasons depicted below. In short: It's short.

Plus:
The setting is refreshing: A British pub. Some old school homebrew (...) games play in that setting, but trust me, this one's fresh.
The story triggered my curiosity. All of a sudden the beer in your favourite pub tastes horrible. Something supernatural? Investigate!
The room descriptions are atmospheric.

Minus:
It's really short! Basically it's one puzzle. So sad!
For me, the end didn't explain a lot of what was going on. I could vaguely retell you the story in general, but what exactly has been happening, remains a mystery to me.
Given it's so short - a bit more of implementation would have been fine. Some additional topics to talk to the NPCs about, a few more items to examine... And one or two additional puzzles of course!

So unless I oversaw something -

Page 1: Text with X=6 choices. Whatever you chose, it's Page 1 with X-1 choices. When you're down to 0 you're going back to Page 1. That's it.

I'm not a big fan of CYOA games but I do have a sweet tooth for fresh settings and good stories, so I gave it a try.

The setting IS fresh. An unspecific apocalypse has happened, society is collapsing but not yet completely collapsed, and the player has a daily job as a florist. Everything's a bit surreal.

There's graphics that, although of pretty bad quality, support the atmosphere. There's also ambient sounds which fit in nicely. Overall, the presentation is pretty neat.

There's few choices, and as always I have no idea in how far they matter. The game lasted for about 15 minutes, and it made me want to get to know more about the game world, but since it's a CYOA game I couldn't.

The choices were few, and I have no idea what alternative plot turns I missed.

Story: The prologue of the The Awakening series (that never came to life) doesn't have much of a story. You start in an every day situation, then you are transported into a sci-fi world, and then the prologue is over. Would one want to know more? Not me. 2/5.

Writing: Solid minimalism. Decent by late 1990's standard, but this one was written in 2010. Almost a 3, but quite a few stylistic bloopers. 2/5.

Puzzles: Game's on rails, and it's only seven moves to the end, so there's not that much puzzle to place. 1/5.

Implementation: That little game that there is is implemented solidly. Parser fails if you try odd stuff, but you don't have you, so it's... sufficient. 3/5.

Fun: Ends before it can become interesting. 1/5.

The verdict: 1.9/5 - A bad experience. But then, it's the author's first (and only, as it seems) attempt at writing IF. I bet chapter two would have been a 2.9.

An interesting story frame, to say something positive. A very cliché-ridden fantasy world. Quite some slips of the pen - wrong genders, pronouns without attributions etc. The playthrough I chose was very, very dull (Spoiler - click to show)("Patriarch-Bischof, you're evil!" - "Yeah right, sorry. Won't happen again." - "Okay bye!") but other paths may be more interesting. Contains music that suits very well. I wish the author would work on a parser game with emphasis on the game world, for imho that's where he shines.

The works of James Graham Ballard offer a very(!) interesting background for IF games. The author of this one, Mike Bonsall, is not exactly a novice to the works of Ballard. Problem is, his approach to IF is a different one to that which most players would want to take.

Bonsall manages to capture Ballard's writing style and his world building. That's hardly a miracle, with Bonsall having profound knowledge of Ballard's works. But the game is flawed in two ways that spoil it for pretty much every player: Wrong moves lead to your death, and the implementation is minimal. Like, you have two directions to chose from and chose the first one, and you die. And there's an exit east through a door but you can't go east or open the door but have to type "enter door". Sorry Mike, but Scott Adams did better, back in 1978.

So, while the game world and the writing are awesome, the game sucks as f**k. Due to the "wrong exit = death" policy a reworking would be very laborous. This one's a fail, unfortunately.

You are in a guest bedroom. In a house. That's the story. What do you expect from a SpeedIF game?

ASE is full of bugs. Error messages fill your screen every now and then. Items and verbs are not implemented. "Get all" reveals all items in the room, visible or not. Items act weird. The intro states "This is a SUCKY version - not much enjoyment can be derived from it.", and yeah, that's not exactly a lie.

The rooms descriptions are nice. Maybe there's something interesting to discover in the house. I won't find out, coz the bugs and lack of implementation keep my motivation at bay.

Waste of time.

The Adventure was written in BASIC by some high school kid in 1988. The setting is a high school (presumably the author's) with just a handfull of rooms. It's basically a CYOA without the "A"; the required input is a one-letter command from a choice of six. All you can do is move (NESW), "K"ill and "T"alk. Wrong move kills you at sight. So all you can do is try and error until you reach the positive end? Punchline: There is no positive end. The longest chain of commands will still result in death.

Someone with too much spare time ported this game to Inform 6. Still pondering whether that was an justiciable act. Playing this game feels like unlawful detention. Pun intended.