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Review
Sparse (but evocative) descriptions, irreversable situations (which are easily identifiable so you're unlikely to be unfairly put in a walking dead situation), characters which are implemented just enough, a parser that sometimes is a bit too stubborn in asking you "What with?" in situations where modern players will facepalm and respond "What do you think with?" (disambiguation is a blessing for some and a curse for others), lots of randomised combat with lots of undo ("attack enemy" will attack with your fists. You need to type "attack enemy with weapon" every time. It gets old. Not every interpreter has an "up arrow to scrollback" feature, and the game shouldn't rely on it)... this feels like an oldschool game, but without falling into the worst of the oldschool design that I would unashamedly call "bad".
You'll find the logic in this quest starring the none-too-bright titular character is mostly cartoonish. And it works. I mean, the important thing is for the tone to be consistent, right? If one is taught to expect cartoon logic, then one can roll with it. And the game is consistent. I was enjoying it until the pirate mob scene, which gave me a two-move limit to do something. Spoilers follow: the stuff I tried.
(Spoiler - click to show)I had tried lots of stuff. I had tried restoring and closing the door to the captain's quarters, as well as the wardrobe and the porthoile, leaving everything as I'd found it so maybe she wouldn't find out. I tried hiding in the ship, in the boulders, climbing the mast. I tried _really_ hard to push that gangplank out of the way. Bulky Barbarian, it's the whole plot that he's strong and dumb, why not just lift the gankplank and throw it into the water?Eventually, having gotten exhausted, being directionless, and operating on a very tight limit (and reasonably sure I wasn't in a walking dead, but knowing that the game had taught me I migt well be - and indeed I wasn't, but indeed it is possible to be in a walking dead here if you don't have a certain item), I turned to the hint system, HELP WITH. Which spectacularly failed to recognise anything I threw at it and gave me no help at all.
At this point I decided enough was enough. The randomised combat was the worst; the puzzles, so far, were the best of the experience (a good thing, that!), but it wasn't worth the stress of this tight-move-limit situation in a game that felt so barely implemented it couldn't properly respond to my attempts at solving the puzzle.
When I checked out the actual solution, I went...
(Spoiler - click to show)I mean... it makes sense, especially it makes cartoon logic sense, but it just never crossed my mind that the gangplank would burn so quick and so easy as to stop the mob that's right on my heels. Besides, and this is the damning bit, my previous attempts to interact with the gankplank had such spectacularly _default_ failure messages I had given up on the gangplank at all.So overall, to me, the game crossed a certain line I personally don't like to see cross. But I gotta say, the oldschool-but-not-too-much and the puzzles that I did get to see and solve were kinda a treat.
