External Links

Play Online
punkpnts.z5
Requires a Z-Code interpreter. Visit IFWiki for download links.
punkpnts.z5
original competition entry
Requires a Z-Code interpreter. Visit IFWiki for download links.

Have you played this game?

You can rate this game, record that you've played it, or put it on your wish list after you log in.

Punk Points

by Jim Munroe profile

2000
Slice of life
Inform 6

(based on 19 ratings)
3 reviews22 members have played this game. It's on 19 wishlists.

About the Story

"It's the first day of high school and you've decided to give yourself a mohawk. Now you've gotta stand up to teachers, impress peers and make a name for yourself until you've earned enough Punk Points to escape the suburbs." [--blurb from Competition Aught-Zero]

Awards

Ratings and Reviews

5 star:
(0)
4 star:
(5)
3 star:
(9)
2 star:
(3)
1 star:
(2)
Average Rating: based on 19 ratings
Number of Reviews Written by IFDB Members: 3
Write a review
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Punk atmosphere, but punk implementation!, July 7, 2010

This is a short game about a boy in a strict Catholic high school and its "adventures" as a punk rebel wannabe. The writing is quite good, conveying a nice atmosphere in the dialogues and the cutscenes, and making the PC and its friends quite believable. The puzzles are OK, quite simple and somewhat entertaining, but sometimes suffer from guess-the-verb problems (but since English isn't my native language, I may be wrong). My main reproach is the implementation: there are some bugs and typos (as well as some whitespaces missing here and there), not many interactive objects, and the characters are also sparserly implemented, with only a couple of one-line answers; it's light, fast and sometimes not very-well executed -- as a punk gig could be. In a nutshell I liked the theme, the game was quite good, but a bit empty and lacked a better implementation.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A grungy slice-of-life game about trying to show how punk you are, February 3, 2016

In this game, you are in a strict Catholic school, and you have to show how much you can rebel.

It's a sort of grungy, pimple-popping feel, sort of the way I've heard Odysseus and Catcher in the Rye described. The f*** word is sprinkled throughout, as well as a few other profanities, some teenage drinking, etc.

Basically, you have some punk friends, and you want to show everyone how punk you are by mouthing off, wearing crazy stuff, swiping things, etc.

I stopped playing partway through, because it's not my sort of thing.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

3 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Railroaded, July 30, 2008

A series of awkward guess-the-verb puzzles punctuated by amusing, well-written cutscenes. A walkthrough would make this into a light read. Only recommended if you are willing to guess the verb in return for a story about a High School boy who wants his peers to think he is hardcore.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

3 Off-Site Reviews

Baf's Guide


You're a teenager trying to demonstrate to yourself and to your peers how angry and rebellious you are. The attitude comes across well, and the puzzles do a reasonably good job of conveying the challenges a would-be punk faces (and the punk's approach to overcoming them)--the main problem is that some of the solutions are a bit obscure and insufficiently clued (or encounter syntax problems). The implementation isn't perfect, but it's adequate, and the writing occasionally shines. A hint system and a bug cleanup from being a top-notch effort.

-- Duncan Stevens

>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction

Here's a thesis: the method for making a great punk rock song is antithetical to the method for making a great IF game. See, when you're making punk rock, the main thing is emotion. It doesn't matter if you play the wrong chord, or sing the wrong note, or say the wrong words -- those are details, and they aren't important... But great IF doesn't get made like this. The best IF authors are less like Sid Vicious or Jello Biafra and more like Todd Rundgren or (to take a really non-punk example) Mick Jones of Foreigner. That is to say, they are studio wizards who put endless attention into the details...

By now you probably know where I'm going with this analogy. Punk Points is put together like a great punk rock song, which unfortunately makes it pretty much middling poor IF.
See the full review

SynTax
The game is set in a school and you are a 13 year old male teenager with a poor self-image. Enough said!
-- Dorothy Millard
See the full review

Tags

- View the most common tags (What's a tag?)

(Log in to add your own tags)
Search all tags on IFDB | View all tags on IFDB

Tags you added are shown below with checkmarks. To remove one of your tags, simply un-check it.

Enter new tags here (use commas to separate tags):

Game Details

Punk Points on IFDB

Polls

The following polls include votes for Punk Points:

Games that show everyday life by Sam Jackson
I'm looking for preferably short games that focus on part of someone's life in our world and preferably our time. I would like games with an emotional focus.

Lost Treasures of the IF Comp by Molly
It seems that for every Comp game that's still talked about today (e.g., Slouching Towards Bedlam, Shade, Photopia, etc.), there's ten or so that have been almost completely forgotten; some of them even placed in the top ten or higher....

Sex in non-adult IF by Ferret From Hell
It struck me the other day that sex is one thing that actually seems to feature rarely in IF. What games are there, other than out and out AIF, that give prominence to sex or sex scenes? The only ones that immediately spring to mind are...

See all polls with votes for this game

RSS Feeds

New member reviews
Updates to external links
All updates to this page


This is version 7 of this page, edited by Paul O'Brian on 7 May 2022 at 12:40am. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item - Delete This Page