Chuk and the Arena

The Gaming Philosopher

The puzzles make sense and are cleverly put together, reusing existing skills, items and people often enough to feel organic. A very solid piece of ‘classic’ IF implemented in a link-based system.
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These Heterogenous Tasks
Solid design work, serviceable writing, and mild fun.
It’s very much an adventure game in format – if anything, it reminded me of the classic point-and-click era, what with its populated world full of cartoonish oddball characters, underdog protagonist and focus on combining items.
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IFComprehensive

Despite being a light, choice-based game, “Chuk and the Arena” is a complex game with intricate, well-designed puzzles.
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The Breakfast Review
It's a pretty long game, presented in point-and-click hypertext, though I associate much of its puzzle sensibilities with the more open world of parser games. [...]The NPCs were well drawn, with distinct personalities, and the overall plot was woven into the gameplay quite well. The nominal challenge, that of defeating the warriors in the arena, required a bit more brainpower with each new opponent, and it never felt stale.
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Average Rating: Number of Reviews: 1 Write a review

This game has some of the most devilish puzzles I've seen in quite some time-and it's in Twine! Twine puzzlers have been getting far better in recent years, and this author has already been one to push the envelope with last year's game Lux.

In this game, you play as an intrepid (but tiny) alien, who must fight against 3 opponents. I thought this would just sort of be a combat game, but very little of the game is actual combat. Almost all of the game is exploring and using inventory objects.

Most of the early puzzles can be solved by changing your color. This strategy is used in man interesting ways throughout the game (although it would have been cool to have a call-back to it at the very end!). Later on, you gather a good deal of inventory items, each of which can be used on any scenery object and on each other, for a quadratic set of possibilities similar to Robin Johnson's games.

This game isn't perfect. I thought the opening was really long and non-interactive, but then once I realized the true scope of the game it made sense. Conversation is just lawn-mowering, which can get tedious. Guessing the exactly correct combination can be hard at times.

But I think this will do very well overall.

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