The Garlic Cage, Episode I

Yet another silly, random, and brutally unpolished game. The story is easy enough to follow - as you eventually discover, you are locked in a Garlic Cage, (Spoiler - click to show)a device that turns its victims into garlic, and presumably you are expected to try and find your way out. Personally, I wouldn't know - the game became unwinnable after 4 out of 10 points, (Spoiler - click to show)when the world turned dark and the only tool I had on hand was a rusty wire bent into the shape of a key. It clearly hasn't been tested, let alone proofread: I spent several turns trying to figure out what to do with a "garlic glove" that I was presented, which the game adamantly insisted didn't exist, until I realized it was supposed to be a garlic clove and typed in the word the game recognized. Considering that eating these cloves (gloves?) is apparently one of the main goals of the game, it's fairly obvious that the creators compiled the game and uploaded it without ever actually playing it to make sure it ran right. And again, I appear to have hit some kind of time limit without any clue as to what I was supposed to do next - was there another clove I missed, one that could've spared me a presumably garlicky fate if eaten? The game seemingly drops them into existence without any fanfare or indication of their number, so I couldn't tell you.

My advice to the creators of this game? Stop making games. At the very least, understand that you are making yourselves look like trolls in the IF community by releasing untested, unpolished, and unfinished games. Get someone to play your games, tear them apart, and tell you each and every last thing that's wrong with them so you can make them at least playable before you even consider uploading another one to the Internet.

(As for the title of this review? That's what you get if you type "smell" all by itself. Yes, even though the game hammers into your head over and over that everything smells like garlic. Given, an overpowering smell of garlic should count as "nothing unexpected" in context, but the default message is still symptomatic of the laziness that pervades this waste of server space.)