Gambler's Quest

I have a little ritual I follow at the beginning of every parser game I play: I turn on transcripting, I type ABOUT, I type CREDITS, I type X ME, and I type I(NVENTORY). I find it works well to start grounding myself in the world, providing both out-of-game and in-game context for what’s to come. It also serves as a brown-M&Ms-style heuristic for the amount of effort the author put into the game – no testers listed in the credits or a default “as good looking as ever” for the player’s description aren’t a great sign, and I adjust my expectations accordingly. Gambler’s Quest I think has the unfortunate distinction of being the first game to fail four out of five of these simple steps: the protagonist is wearing a nightgown but otherwise has no custom description, neither ABOUT nor CREDITS are recognized, and somehow TRANSCRIPT has even been turned off.

The game’s opening at least contains a note that this is a “demo”, so hopefully these oversights are just due to a lack of time. There are some glimmers of promise in what’s so far a generic comedy-fantasy adventure: I liked that one of the trophies in the adventurer’s guild is of a sock with a hole in it, and there’s at least a mean-spirited energy in the way the protagonist reacts to the king announcing new common-sense regulation of gambling by deciding to plot a royal assassination. But the game currently ends just as it’s getting started, there are locations and characters that seem like they’re standing around waiting to get included in a puzzle, and too high a proportion of what few words there are in this five-minute stub don’t aspire to do anything in particular:

> x table

A sturdy small oak table.

> x chair

A wooden chair matched with the oak table.

> x bed

An unmade bed where you just slept.

> make bed

That is not a verb I recognize.

> x nightstand

A modest bedside nightstand.

I won’t belabor my other complaints because I don’t think there’s much point; both in scope and polish, this is maybe 10% of a game. Could that game be good once the other 90% is filled in? On the evidence of what we see here, I think that could certainly happen. But it’s hard to recommend spending time on the limited excerpt available now while we wait to find out.