Ratings and Reviews by Nomad

The Lesson of the Tortoise is a short, okay game with an interesting setting. You're a Chinese farmer who finds out his wife has a lover, and those two dump him in the basement of his own home, probably to kill him later. Interesting setup, innit?

Unfortunately the game is very short, linear, and not overly well implemented. The plot takes a few (well, three, it's short after all) sharp bends that are interesting but leave you wondering if that was really necessary. It resembles a fable that's been brought into IF form with a sledgehammer. Also, it's somewhat underimplemented, could need a transcript or two to smooth the crucial scenes.

All in all, I'd bet you start the game because of the promise of an interesting scenario, and then when you're done you're like, "Okay, but that was it?!" Waste of potential, probably.

You are thrown into a typical slice-of-life situation: You find yourself at the foot of a tree, and your corn dog is somewhere up in the tree. You get choices, and with each choice a usually completely unrelated consequence happens. Like, you decide to climb the tree, and happen to stumble across a family of elves living in the tree. Or you decide to walk to the next gas station, but on the way you meet a troll who's got a problem with the local skateboard kids. Stuff like that, all the time. Chosing the wrong answer results in an end screen. As funny and entertaining as requesting a new passport at the registration office, but less rewarding. Two thumbs up in case it was written, as I suspect, by an ADHD-infected teenager within the scope of a mandatory homework. If you're looking for entertainment as a player, look elsewhere.

Oh, you play as a small dinosaur. Doesn't change a thing.

C64 only. A slightly obscure commercial game, didn't get much attention back when it was published, which was in 1985.

The game throws you right into the pit. Probably pardonable, let's assume the original game featured some sort of instructions. You can find some blurb on the web: Free the king's daughter from an evil magician.

Designwise the game is pretty horrible. The rooms are generic and don't even try to form something like a game world. The two-word parser is stubborn. The puzzles are not blended into the action. The typography is one big mess, looks a little like noone ever proofread the (commercial!) game.

On the plus side the game has a few surprises up the sleeves. It's just one file so it's limited to 64k of memory. Probably a tape release. It features graphics and music(!), so there's almost no memory left for the game and parser antics, right? Wrong! The map is rather large, you control two characters (although you can't switch at will), and you can command an NPC (a walking tree, of all sorts). The puzzles, as randomly thrown onto the map as they are, are associative and thus not too difficult, yet somewhat rewarding.

Not recommended for people used to sophisticated parsers of the Inform age. If you have witnessed and enjoyed the 8-bit era, or if you have a weird interest in how adventures looked like before the invention of upright walking, you might want to give this one a brief look.