Take One

Version 1 of the review that used the wrong interpreter (only play this with Adrift 4):
(Spoiler - click to show)You know you have a good game on your hands when you can't solve it following a walkthrough word by word.

This is exactly the case with Robert Street's "adventure" game Take One, clearly the work of someone who didn't even try to make a playable game.

The basic idea of directing an actress on a movie set, while not an uninteresting idea, is implemented absolutely poorly. Take One is not even able to keep the perspective straight! Whilst the protagonist of the game is "Indianette Jones" (a stereotypical dumb blonde, by the way), described in the third person, commands like "inventory" result in a confusing "Myself is carrying..." output. So who are you actually playing?!

Let's talk about the biggest failure of Take One, the parser. There are bad parsers, there are really bad parsers, and then there's this game. I don't want to "spoil" your "fun" (in case you decide to subjugate yourself to the torture of trying out this piece of fiction yourself), but let me just say that if a million monkeys on a million typewriters were forced to write a playable interactive fiction game, it wouldn't take them all eternity to come up with a much better result than Robert Street. Even the basic fundamentals of internal logic are broken (the game "magically" forgetting about the direction you came from and therefore trapping you, needing to refer to unseen objects in order to progress, etc...). One might theorize that like Nintendo Hard old-school video games the broken controls attempt to make the game (rather unfairly) harder, but it's much more probable the author just didn't have a clue what he was doing.

To cut a long story short, don't play it. Don't touch it. Don't even point at it.

1/10

PS: I have a bit of a problem with reviewing a game I couldn't play to the end. In this case even the walkthrough didn't help me, but of course if anybody knows how to get to the end I will revise my review.

Version 2:

Take One by Robert Street is a very short, very linear game. In fact, even with the walkthrough, you will likely have a hard time beating it if you don't follow it to the word. A pretty unrealistic time counter (even trivialities and failed actions use up time, for example) limits the exploring you will do in this game and pretty much ensures you have to play it again and again to figure it out. Aside from this bad design decision, the syntax is quite picky, which is guaranteed to hamper your abilities of puzzle-solving. Due to its short length, with some patience the game should be beatable though.

Compared even to the bad gameplay, the story of Take One isn't a beautiful and unique snowflake either. The premise tells you that you are a film director in command of a Indiana Jones-referencing character, yet the perspective is just like in any other interactive fiction game. Crystals, supernatural beings and the likes are used in pretty stereotypical manner and there isn't even an attempt to make the story or setting different from something that was thought up in five minutes. A particular odd writing quirk is that the stereotypical dumb blonde protagonist is insulted by the movie director (which is you!) in both the very beginning and end of the game, yet there isn't the slightest justification for it anywhere in the game text!

Bottom line: Another "play and forget" game. 2/10