Ratings and Reviews by Nomad

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.

So you're supposed to find a haunted house (which is right in front of you but on an island) and challenge a ghost inside. A bit generic, but probably suitable for the Halloween theme. Probably homebrew parser. And that's where the trouble starts.

Typical two-word parser ambience. Okayish room descriptions, though punctuation makes them hard to read at times. Rooms are incoherent, here you're in an orchard, one step south you're on a beach that's never been mentioned before. You can only interact with what's mentioned as "Here is ...". The text is written in caps lock, which is annoying, if only mildly. The parser does not accept abbreviations. The room descriptions do not indicate available exits. Sudden death is possible if you move in the wrong direction.

Back in 1980 this might have been a smasher, but really, I'm too old for this shit.