External Links
- picket.dat
data file
To play, you can download picket.dat and run the game in an interpreter program - refer to the game's documentation for details.
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Awards
14th Place - 2nd Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (1996)
Ratings and Reviews
| Average Rating:   Number of Reviews Written by IFDB Members: 1 |
A great little nugget of a homebrew parser. Small fantasy land, July 3, 2017*This is how homebrew parsers should be; and it makes sense, coming just 3 years after Inform was created and making new parsers was less intimidating.
This is a compact fantasy world, with only 7 or so locations. It has a gnome, a toadstool garden, and a mad scientist. It has good cluing, and fun, open mechanics including potions/chemicals you can try on things (nothing complicated).
The only thing I found difficult was that one important room exit was only mentioned once, in one event, with no way to read that text again once it scrolled back. So its important to read everything carefully.
5 Off-Site Reviews
Baf's Guide
A child's request that you recover a lost toy leads you into a whimsical little world inhabited by a mad scientist and a greedy gnome. Not difficult, but charming in its way.
-- Carl Muckenhoupt
SPAG
The world itself is far more Carroll than Tolkien, and the difference shines through (though there's nothing inherently wrong with traditional I-F fantasy as it currently stands). The perfect length, nice prose, a couple of clever puzzles, and a surprisingly good parser and DOS-based game engine.
-- C.E. Forman
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SynTax
Although the scenery and items in PICKET fluctuate wildly between the mundane and the magical (a scientist and gnome apparently co- exist quite happily as neighbours), the writing is quite descriptive, and the author successfully maintains this rather odd atmosphere throughout the game.
-- Bev Truter
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SynTax
The game has only a few puzzles and none of them are extremely difficult. Only one of them near the end had me worried for any length of time. The game has been translated I think from Swedish, but I found no spelling mistakes and only one bug involving the swan. This did not detract from the game or make it impossible to finish.
-- Peter Clark
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>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction
Picket is a gently whimsical fantasy without much of a plot, whose main interesting feature is its interface. [...] It provided a pleasant hour’s entertainment, with a few jarring moments where the prose deviated from standard English. All in all, an enjoyable if unspectacular game.
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Tags
Game Details
Current Version: Release 1
License: Freeware
Development System: Pascal
Baf's Guide ID: 169
IFID: Unknown
TUID: 4x0u04kk511t2s0w
The Land Beyond the Picket Fence on IFDB
Recommended Lists
The Land Beyond the Picket Fence appears in the following Recommended Lists:Best fantasy games by MathBrush
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This is version 7 of this page, edited by JTN on 24 September 2024 at 7:28pm. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item - Delete This Page
