Adventures Extraordinaire

This is a game for the text adventure literacy project. It has some nice art and is written in adventuron.

I struggled a lot with this one. To begin with, LOOK doesn't work, but only LOOK AROUND does. Since LOOK usually works with adventuron, I can only assume the author intentionally disabled it.

There is a strict inventory limit of four items, although almost all items in the game are pretty small.

Many commands that should work are not recognized. The game has a helpful tutorial mode, but many of its suggestions do not work. There is a walkthrough provided on the game page, but much of the walkthrough is incorrect.

At one point, following the walkthrough, I forgot something, so I tried to get back to the office, but locked myself out of victory with all items inside the castle. I was frustrated, but replayed to the end.

There is a second day available, but the first story was complete, and as the second day has less bugfixes, I'd rather not play it until it's more tuned-up.

The game does, though, have some fun art.

Adventurous Extraordinare starts with an intriguing premise: you're a detective who is trying to solve fairy tales gone wrong. The graphics are really very nice. It gets a little too absurd, and the custom parser doesn't accept simple things that should work, and I think that's part of the problem with writing something in the different than your first language. Those two things combined to make what should have been a simple and relatively tidy game with fun quirks become something rather tricky to play, where you know what do to but the parser just isn't quite cooperating. Perhaps I would've given up if I didn't want to review all ten games for the TALP jam. And yes, this was one I passed on, when I initially wrote reviews. It made more sense the second time through. But the writer gave themselves a lot of hurdles to jump over, and despite some clear diligence fixing bugs in their change log, it didn't always work.

Your first order of business is to get out of your office, which is locked, and of course you've misplaced your keys. This implies you actually sleep there and also makes for a handy lead-in to the tutorial. You can also read the writing on your office door, which is your name backwards (a nice touch: it's chosen from five random first and last names that fans of crime fiction will recognize, and of course it reads correctly once you're in the hallway) but you just don't recognize it. While AE is meant to be absurd, there's a lot of reaching that can strain belief, especially when you go to meet a huntsman who, the game says, you should really help people, and then he traps you and captures you. So you're bounced around a bit with a rather wonky plot.

Snow White and the evil queen get involved, too, and I think probably the strongest bit is the main puzzle in the forest, where you need to find a map in order to make it to the castle, and you bump around randomly until then, but fortunately, there really aren't very many rooms. The ending bit is kind of cute, too, because it's pretty clear what to do once you're in the castle with not many ways to get out but at the end, you actually have five different ways to answer the question the queen asks of you, which is one that's pretty standard for fairy tales. There are two standard answers, but the three non-standard ones make the payoff worthwhile.

Worthwile enough to forgive the annoyance of having to type WAIT TIME instead of JUST wait, or LOOK AROUND instead of LOOK. L is also used, but my brain had a brief blip where I saw them both and LOOK AROUND captured my attention, because it was a lot longer. Unintended consequences. And the inventory limit is a bit frustrating, and there's a way to lock yourself out of the ending, which I guess makes sense physically (all your items are taken, and you need to get them back,) and the player should know better. But it's kind of mean for such a relatively cheery game in a tutorial jam.

The author promised a sequel, or Day 2, and it arrived, replete with bears and gruel and even a troll. But it was unsolvable because I could not type a hyphen in. Looking at their itch.io page, they'd moved on to other whimsical but intriguing small projects. I was glad to see they were still creating and trying new stuff. But I sort of wish they'd have found more time to nail down AE's flaws--oh, and get Day 2 tested. I was able to read the source to see their plans, and it was similar to Day 1, and I was sort of sad I didn't have the chance to play through their intended experience.

You play as Mickey Spillane's character Mike Hammer P.I., but the concept is abandoned as soon as you take a taxi to the English countryside. Apparently New York gumshoe Mike Hammer has relocated to England now? Naturally, he ends up meeting the Queen, who for some reason is now also part of the Snow White story, and wants Hammer to check who the fairest of them all is. Never mind that the magic mirror is literally in the next room (remind me why she needs a P.I. for this?), and her guard won't let you visit it, even though the Queen explicitly asked you to, in his presence. So of course you need to start a fire in the castle kitchen to distract the guard, because why wouldn't you? This all makes perfect sense.

Adventure Extraordinaire is so wildly surreal it becomes really charming, and the lovely art further adds to the effect. Unfortunately, it's also virtually unplayable. There is no way a normal human being could make any progress in this game without copious amounts of LSD, or by following the cheat sheet (thankfully available from the game's web page).