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About the Story
"some thing inside of me has opened up its eyes why did you put it there? did you not realize?" [--blurb from Competition Aught-Zero]
Awards
16th Place - 6th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2000)
Ratings and Reviews
| Average Rating:   Number of Reviews Written by IFDB Members: 2 |
This game is a well-written and programmed Lovecraftian horror game set in the time of slavery and wooden sailing ships.
You wake up, bound and gagged in a fascinating sequence, before landing on a mysterious island.
This game does a good job of being disorienting and horror-filling. It is grotesquely violent at some points, and has some non-consensual and non-explicit advances by one character.
This adventure is actually pretty cool in concept. You've just been set afloat by a bunch of pirates and find yourself bound in a tiny life raft with an island just in sight. The story seems really good here as well as the characters. There are a few puzzles, not too difficult, but there is hardly any control over your character except a small bit in the middle which I thought was fine. The cliffhanger was well executed, but there is just one killer that makes this game a 2 star. Ok this prologue was made in 2000. So much for the full version. Honestly just don't play this game unless you want to be tortured by the missing end.
4 Off-Site Reviews
Baf's Guide
You have a run-in with some shipmates and are set adrift in a dinghy. Written as a prologue to a longer game. Polished, with lots of bells and whistles (footnotes and specialized commands), but there isn't a lot to do in terms of actual playing. (The middle section allows for some exploration, but very little interaction with what you find.) Nicely ambiguous and cliffhangery endings.
-- Duncan Stevens
>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction
Apparently, the version of ATWCTW that was entered in the comp this year, despite the fact that it's 173K and in .z8 format (a combination I confess I don't quite understand), is actually only a preview of the real ATWCTW, which I assume is forthcoming sometime. Still, even though it ends rather abruptly, as many adventure game demos do, this version is a substantial chunk of adventuring all on its own. For one thing, it has clearly been coded with a great deal of care. ATWCTW feels almost like a commercial graphic adventure game in terms of the number of features it offers for players.
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SPAG
The author does well to create a sense of foreboding throughout the piece, and generally it succeeds in maintaining an atmosphere of dread. This was only occasionally deflated by a poorly chosen phrase ('butt naked' and a reference to 'the enemies you've wasted' seem anachronistic) or an unsuitable quotation (Lovecraft and the Necronomicron are fine -- but Nine Inch Nails?)
-- Alfredo Garcia
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SynTax
It is a H. P. Lovecraft-style horror and the story is told in flashback style. I didn't get very far in this game as I couldn't work out what to do and the hints were disabled!
-- Dorothy Millard
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Tags
Game Details
Current Version: Release 1
License: Freeware
Development System: Inform 6
Baf's Guide ID: 1009
IFID: ZCODE-1-000914-3EAA
TUID: 3pbb1qgt5sgiwxpk
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This is version 7 of this page, edited by Paul O'Brian on 7 May 2022 at 1:34am. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item - Delete This Page
