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Review
After a few Barry Basic entries and several other works, one sort of expects a baseline for Dee Cooke's work, and Barry Basic and the Witch's Cave hits that and then some. It's an increasingly ironic name, because in each entry except the very first, you do something not very basic to Adventuron or text adventures at all. I'm worried even this allusion may be a spoiler, because when a lightbulb went on for me, it was a neat moment. It wasn't critical to solving things. Maybe I should have seen it right away. But this is intertwined with another BB game. It might make perfect sense if you played through things in order, though I'd be interested to trade experiences with people who played Barry Basic in a different order than I did. It would probably impact us both differently.
If I recall correctly, BB was one of the games allowed in slightly post-deadline. Good choice by the organizers! And the worst I can say about it is – the difficulty jumps from on the easy side to what is a very neat sequence to complete the final task, so that's uneven. But the final puzzle is quite fun.
In BBWC, you've been sent to the seaside, chaperoned by a horrible teacher named Mr. Brawl, who will spend the day reading the sports section and yelling at kids not to go in the cave. Your task: pick up five seashells, and since Barry is physically slower and weaker than most others, and he's already been pushed around on the bus ride up, there's not much left when he gets going. At first, Barry has to use (ahem) basic verbs to discover a few shells. But of course that cave is there for a reason! After all, this game wasn't titled "Barry Basic and the Witch's Cave He Avoided." And I enjoyed how it jibed with Barry's adventures in future games, looking where he was not supposed to.
The adventure turns surreal once in the cave, with an underground lake and such and new verbs to learn. They're nonstandard, but you know them. How? Well, I'm torn between waffling on this review and giving out untagged spoilers. Suffice it to say the final shell is definitely the hardest, and Barry has an interesting run-in with another student, described below.
(Spoiler - click to show)That student is Tony O'Hara, whom I didn't realize was Barry's big strong friend in Quick Escape until near the end. Then I felt dumb I didn't notice it! I like how the author plays off how Tony and Barry see things, without playing the DUH TONY IS DUMB card. And after I realized Tony was that Tony, I realized it answered another question I had in BBQE: how the heck did these two very different people wind up as friends? Perhaps we will find how Barry and Gill met in another game in the series, too. I'd like that.
Also, I'd like to see more Adventuron games where you can switch between characters. On the strength of the Barry Basic games, I see a lot of possibilities.
That run-in, though, made me realize the one thing I felt was missing. It's well done, as you do things to the landscape that make the graphics for a room change (the author does a lot of this. It's a neat feature of Adventuron.) But it has something its predecessors don't. Barry already feels established in them, and here, if the difficulty isn't as well distributed (yet--post comp releases can fix stuff) Barry Basic and the Speed Daemon felt more smoothly paced despite being bigger. It felt like the author missed a chance to maybe put in more conflicts with other kids, nothing terribly violent, but enough to make puzzles tougher before ramping up to the big one. Still, the game is more than complete, and I wouldn't have liked the author to put off publishing BBWC over that.
So, yes, I really liked BBWC overall. Mr. Brawl is an effective antagonist, though there is another, later. You just know that cave he tells you not to explore is going to be explored, and you will find out why it is dangerous. The conflicts were resolved well. I am already looking forward to a fifth entry. If you are considering playing this after TALP 2023, though, I recommend you start with Barry Basic and the Quick Escape.
