Reviews by Nomad

Wow.

First glance: Artsy experiment
But then does the fun increment
It's a game of adventurous exploring
Scattered puzzles make sure it's not boring
For a Twine game it's really excellent

It's not a game, just a story you click through. But the story is nice. Well, it's pretty trivial until the one interesting twist, but that'll grab you, promise. Makes me a bit sad it's not a game.

Shambolic, horribly implemented. If the storyline wasn't on rails you'd never get beyond the first room. Plus, the story didn't grab me.

Robin Johnson has a lot of quirky ideas, and within the severe limitations of the format of his game (see below) the writing is amusing, refreshing and down to the point. That should easily make forget that the setting of the game is pretty cliché.

Unfortunately the technical novelty of reducing a parser game to the most indispensable verbs and available objects leads to two problems: The solution to many puzzles is obvious when the necessary verb-object combination is suddenly highlighted (e.g. a beer usually has the options "drop" and "drink" with it, and when the right situation comes up an additional "give" option pops up), and not coming up with the correct solution immediately entices you to fall a dull simply-click-everything routine that many magazine editors criticize about P&C adventures. It doesn't exactly help that the entire text is kept in a Scott Adams telegraphic style which cuts off the feeling of exploring a game world's details.

As an interface experiment Draculaland is really cool. And it has its moments, see above. But in general, as a game I want to dive into it fails.

A nice reminiscence of 1980's C64 cassette games. I'm now too old to wrestle a parser though.

A Chose-your-own-adventure game with sexual content. Good idea, but bad implementation: The "story" doesn't captivate at all, and apart from a few story branches there's not much of a "game" aspect. Wasted potential.

The James Bond setting in the Austrian Alps was fresh at the time and would still be promising. Everything else... Alpine Encounter's competitors in 1985 were games such as The Pawn, Nine Princes in Amber or Dragonworld. Textwise, Infocom released A Mind Forever Voyaging, Spellbreaker and Wishbringer that same year. On the graphics front, Mindscape released Déjà Vu in 1985. Alpine Encounter's has a two-word parser, sparse room descriptions, and lets you guess the essential commands in every damn room. Antiquated the moment it hit the shelves.

Clicking through hyperlinks to find a path that lets you get on with the story. Time limit. Snack-sized game. Not my thing. Setting has potential though.

You're just clicking through text. Not even "choices" to chose from. As a simple text the concept is not too bad - the text is divided into 24 chapters, mimicing an advent calendar. As a game, it fails completely.

'Nuff said. Five minutes playtime, and being a hamster allows for some unusual and funny situations. The "intro" is a bit confusing and the parser is not very sophisticated, but the game is won before you even notice that. If I had to limit myself to one word only, it'd be "cute".