Priceless Vase Adventure

Priceless Vase Adventure (TALP), by Robert Szacki

This is a small ten-room game where the object is, well, to find a priceless vase inside a hotel. There's no huge storyline here, beyond that you are named Anthony Smith and are in need of money. You have a coin to start.

The puzzles to get through are, for the most part, trading. The trading doesn't make ultra-rigorous sense if you put your critic hat on (I still maintain that most people would rather eat a sandwich before playing sports than soup,) but if something is listed separate from the room description, it's important. There is even one dark room and one dark item. You can quickly figure they're related and you can use a light source–and that doesn't involve taking the lamps that are scenery.

You wind up having to guess two verbs along the way, which are not hard, though in one case, I tried to play it safe by adding a noun, e.g. EAT FROG instead of EAT, and the parser rejected it. Which was inconsistent with before when USE X didn't work, but USE X ON Y did. That said, the puzzles were fair.

ADL is a bit ancient, and as such, it doesn't naturally understand stuff like implicit nouns, like Inform dies. The confusion wasn't game-breaking, but this was frustrating in particular at the end, where I was in a slight "did I do this/try all possible combos of the command?" fog. In fact, at the end, I needed to spell something out, and I got pinged at first for not doing so, but then I remembered how to use the parser–because I'd seen it before. I don't know if ADL has this implicit-noun capability. We take it for granted.

This feels like a step up from the author's previous ADL efforts. The dark room provides some mystery, and the NPC interactions give the hotel some life, and the verb guess puzzles provide a good and very fair introduction to going beyond the basic commands. Stuff like double-dipping on important commands (e.g. taking something twice) is rejected, too. I guess my problem is that I was able to solve the puzzles because there was nothing else to do, and since the game had a solution, doing X had to be it. So I wasn't left as fulfilled as I could've been. And I wish more scenery could have been implemented.

This all feels fixable, though. The author mentioned he planned to tighten up certain things, and he ran into the deadline. And I've been there too.

This game was written using ADL, which was the engine Ken and Roberta Williams used for some early Hi-Res Adventures (from what I can gather, though I may be wrong).

The game itself is a downloadable windows executable. It consists of a moderate number of rooms (around 10-15), each with either one interesting item or one interesting NPC. Nothing can be interacted with outside of these singular items (no scenery, etc.). All play consists of fetching one item in one room to get a new item in another room (like a trading-up quest). There are occasional typos, and the storyline isn't really there.

The author has admitted to having run out of time. Having more time would certainly improve the game; the author has mentioned implementing the scenery, more puzzles, etc.

For now, though, the game is lacking in polish and descriptiveness, and due to its unfinished nature lacks emotional depth. I'm giving it one star for its current state, but if the author ever updates it I'll definitely increase the rating, as the ideas in it are good, it just looks like it needs more time.