Bob The Barbarian

It is easy, in space-year 2026, to view all old-school parser puzzlers as essentially alike. We’re far enough away from the design sensibilities of the 80s that certain once-common but now passé elements loom so large that it’s hard to see past them. And therefore it’s similarly easy to write a review that simply rehearses the case against those elements, recapitulating in miniature the historical developments that largely consigned them to the dustbin of history, while sparing only the slightest of attention to the idiosyncratic quiddity of the particular game being examined.

OK, I’ll stop being coy: the main element I’m talking about is of course Zarfian cruelty (and I’m not being coy about anything else, to be clear, I haven’t read anyone else’s reviews of this game yet, I’m mostly critiquing other reviews I’ve written here). Bob the Barbarian’s traditionalism is clear from the bog-standard rescue-the-princess premise, and that extends to its approach to difficulty, which occasioned many restarts and a bit of swearing before I won through to the end. As I said, it would be easy to make this review just about that, and I am going to talk it through, but per the above let’s try to dwell on some of the other stuff it’s got going on first.

Right off the bat, the writing is generally a highlight. Being told that the eponymous Bob “come[s] from a long line of proud barbarians, a crude and vulgar pedigree”, evoked a laugh-snort, and the prose manages to keep things feeling zippy and fun even when the gameplay is being a bit of a buzzkill. There are some digs at the protagonist for being dim, which is a bit of the modern barbarian stereotype I find annoying (y’all know that Conan was smart, right?) but here at least it serves partially to set up a cool leveling-up mechanic where you start out illiterate but eventually are able to read, revealing new information about areas you’ve previously visited.

Similarly, the cook’s tour of fantasy locations – you’ve got your foreboding forest, your gritty town, your bucolic farm, a punishing desert, pirate adventure island, and the inevitable Castle ‘o Foozle – boasts not the slightest shred of novelty (and speaking of the desert, I could have done without the game’s one real-world element be clarifying that the fat, untrustworthy camel-dealer is in fact an Arab), but the distinct areas contribute to a solid sense of progression and make coming back to the ends of some of the longer puzzle changes feel satisfying indeed.

The puzzles are also mostly fair; just about everything was logical in retrospect, even if I spent a lot of time in the first half of the game struggling because I’d failed to solve one puzzle that unlocked a major area with the solutions to most of the conundrums I’d been banging my head against (more on that in a bit). There’s one that requires setting fire to an object to prevent people in hot pursuit from using it that I think is wildly overoptimistic about the time it takes things to fully burn, but other than that even some of the more creative ones hold together quite well, with reasonable clueing. I will ding the game a bit for not living into its premise as much as it could have, though – given that it’s called Bob the Barbarian, I was expecting to solve more problems through the power of my thews, but there are surprisingly few places where hitting things or ripping them apart is a viable course of action. The exception is the regular combat sections, I suppose, but these unfortunately aren’t a highlight – they’re rendered as DnD style turn-based wrangling, but your only option is to ATTACK, I don’t think your stats approve over time, and there appears to be an RNG running so it’s quite possible to get killed after a couple of rounds if you’re unlucky or wasting time. As I result I just undo-scummed through these sequences and questioned why they were there.

That’s hopefully an adequate amount of time on the impedimenta, so now it’s on to the difficulty. Bob the Barbarian is very much a cruel game, and it quickly put me in the habit of making frequent, differently-named save files after a few initial setbacks led to a lot of backtracking. This is surely an intended part of the design, so it’s not especially productive to complain about the mere fact that it’s possible, nay, easy to get yourself into an unwinnable position. Still, there are some aspects of the implementation that feel like the game is frustrating even by the unmerciful standards it’s holding itself out to be judged on. For example, while there are a couple of places where it’s reasonably signposted, either before or immediately after the fact, that aimless experimentation can put you in an unwinnable state, there are other places where this kind of aimless experimentation is required. Most egregiously, that one puzzle I mentioned above hinged on using a clearly one-time-only object without any external prompting, and then spending several turns wandering around afterwards before seeing that it had any positive effect – which is tricky in the best of circumstances, but by that point I felt like the game had trained me to think that this kind of behavior was dangerous! There’s similar instance where I felt the game didn’t provide enough information about the likely consequences of my actions, because I thought that a cauldron of beans contained more than one serving so I could go back for more if I needed to – this turned out not to be the case, which contrasted with another area where the game made a big deal out of Bob being kicked out of a location after visiting a couple of times, but actually that puzzle remains solvable no matter what. This kind of inconsistency made it hard for me to engage with the game, and sent me to the walkthrough more than I would have it had been consistent about punishing motiveless action and telegraphing which resources were limited.

Am I saying Bob the Barbarian would be more fun if it was more cruel? …yeah, I think I am; as it is, the game doesn’t feel as much like a challenge to be surmounted as it does, well, a game. And to an extent it does seem like it wants to be solved, at least more so than the original games from which it takes inspiration – there’s a hint system, for one thing, though the way that it requires the player to type the name of an object accessible in the current location dramatically limits its usefulness. So maybe an easier version would have been fine, too – as it is, I enjoyed playing Bob the Barbarian, at least when I wasn’t swearing at it, but feel like I would have dug it more had it moved farther in one direction or the other.