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About the StoryFight in the Grand Galactic Tournament to get back your planet's stolen moon!Game Details |
Awards
Nominee, Best Puzzles - 2019 XYZZY Awards
3rd Place - 25th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2019)
Editorial Reviews
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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Member Reviews
| 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.
If you enjoyed Chuk and the Arena...
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Recommended Lists
Chuk and the Arena appears in the following Recommended Lists:Great games set in space by MathBrush
My list for best sci-fi games has grown too large again, and so I'm splitting it off again. This list only includes games whose primary action is off-planet, or which feature exploring an unfamiliar planet, or which feature...
Polls
The following polls include votes for Chuk and the Arena:For your consideration: XYZZY-eligible Best Overall Games of 2019 by MathBrush
This is for suggesting games released in 2018 which you think might be worth considering for Best Game in the XYZZY awards. This is not a zeroth-round nomination.This is not an official list. The point of poll is partly to suggest games...
For your consideration: XYZZY-eligible Best Story of 2019 by MathBrush
This is for suggesting games released in 2019 which you think might be worth considering for Best Writing in the XYZZY awards. This is not a zeroth-round nomination.This is not an official list. The point of poll is partly to suggest...
For your consideration: XYZZY-eligible Best Overall Puzzles of 2019 by MathBrush
This is for suggesting games released in 2019 which you think might be worth considering for Best Puzzles in the XYZZY awards. This is not a zeroth-round nomination.This is not an official list. The point of poll is partly to suggest...
This is version 6 of this page, edited by JTN on 11 December 2020 at 6:15pm. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item