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About the StoryEat, swear & try to take over the neighbourhood. Game Details |
Entrant, Main Festival - Spring Thing 2022
| Average Rating: ![]() Number of Reviews: 4 Write a review |
A quick, fun jaunt-- or perhaps a "romp"-- into corvidity. Crow Quest has quirky humor plus sweet crow art (many props to the illustrator). It's entirely worth the 5-10 minutes it takes to play through and beat it twice and probably more. Although I was a little disappointed that the game rejected crow names I came up with even when I thought played along well enough ("Aleister Crowley" was my best shot; I get that the idea is that (Spoiler - click to show)nothing you type will work, but playing along anyway is part of the fun and that I felt I could play along from the get-go is a good clue that the game communicates its tone clearly right away), I got a chuckle from the crow names that the game came up with for me too. Being rejected here was more like that cheerful tone Willy Wonka strikes when Violet says, "By gum, it's gum!" and he says, "Wrong!" and he's excited (even delighted) to go on about the wonder of Wonka's Magic Chewing Gum as opposed to being rejected like, "You get nothing, you lose, good day sir!" (I'm talking about the scenes in the '71 movie, but never mind.) Alas my only true disappointment was that despite the bevvy of creative names the game had to replace whatever I came up with, my crow rival Rodney always had the same name.
A lot has and will rightfully be made of corvid intelligence and their uses of strings and sticks and things, but my favorite interaction in this game was probably (Spoiler - click to show)befriending the little girl by giving her the dead frog and seeing how delightfully weird she got with it.
The game also kinda has two levels of difficulty, which is cool. You can play through (Spoiler - click to show)with a partner in crime for immunity to an event or two and the ability to have almost every inventory item at the cost of having to fight at the end, or go (Spoiler - click to show)on your own for a more challenging playthrough.
I wanted more of Crow Quest in the way one wants seconds after a good slice of pie, only to find crumbs left: a larger pool of events, longer storyline, greater complications, more crows in the murder, more items, maybe a higher attitude cap (goodness knows the writing and art have attitude to spare). Even just the bigger event pool would've been welcome, if I was to ask for one thing. Still, it didn't ever come close to wearing out its welcome and I can see how that might be a risk in a version that strings too much together or goes too long, so there's a certain grace and satisfaction in keeping it short. If there is a sequel or an expanded post-comp release I would look forward to playing it though.
For a first foray into Twine, this is a mighty promising game. The narration perfectly captures what I imagine the internal lives of crows to be like. The included artwork is gorgeous. The final battle, where the player has to quickly discern the pattern in a rock-paper-scissors-like sequence, suits the game perfectly: its short length adds pressure to figure out the way to win, while preventing the battle from becoming tedious once the player has already figured it out.
The gameplay of Crow Quest feels very experimental, and this final battle is the one part of the experiment that really lands. Elsewhere, the small scope of the game shows its limitations more readily. The bulk of the game consists of random events which quickly become repetitive. The item selection at the beginning is a fine idea, but quickly ends up feeling meaningless as the items become exhausted and cease to be relevant long before the game is over.
An expanded version of this game would be of much interest to me, though I believe that to carry the concept to its fullest execution, the author would have to take the plunge and craft a more elaborate plot with a clearer throughline rather than relying on random and largely disconnected events.
This is a visually very nice game, and funny, too.
It's a short twine game where you play as a crow with an attitude and intentionally bad spelling (basically 'no u' times 100). Your attitude, is, in fact, measured, and you 'win' by getting the highest attitude.
We played this in the Seattle If Meetup and I played it after, as well.
It's fairly brief, and amusing. It seems to have some kind of randomization or procedural generation, as you can get different events on different playthroughs.
There's some mild profanity. Overall, it's not too long so if the above sounds appealing, try it out.
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