The People's Glorious Revolutionary Text Adventure Game

by Taylor Vaughan

Humor
2010

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Reviews and Ratings

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Number of Ratings: 56
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- OtisTDog, December 22, 2023

- k42write, October 28, 2023

- gattociao, September 19, 2023

- Edo, August 17, 2023

- Bloxwess (Bellaire, Texas), November 10, 2022

- TheBoxThinker, January 22, 2022

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Economic system satire, October 28, 2021

The goal is to turn the capitalist town (Goldwater avenue etc) into a communist paradise by performing the tasks on your to-do list. The puzzles are pretty standard text adventure style and can be annoying, but the solutions are pretty funny. One of my favorite games. Note: you don't need to be a communist to enjoy this game.

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- Zape, March 30, 2021

- Durafen, June 20, 2020

- Guenni (At home), June 7, 2019

- Stian, February 14, 2019

- AKheon (Finland), September 30, 2018

- getlostdont, January 18, 2018

- beriaearwen, October 11, 2017

- Laney Berry, May 18, 2017

- ifMUD_Olly (Montana, USA), April 21, 2017

- SciFinn (Alberta, Canada), December 14, 2016

- E. W. B., March 19, 2016

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
A short-to-mid length silly communism game, February 3, 2016

In this game, you are Commissar of the communist party in a capitalist town. You are given a series of tasks to accomplish to promote the cause of the communist party.

The game has several clever puzzles, and the puzzles have multiple solutions, which is fun. However, some of the puzzles seemed unintuitive.

The game is written from the viewpoint of a strongly anti-capitalist communist man, and the reactions to things like Starbucks is pretty amusing.

I didn't find this game as funny as some of the other reviewers did, although the confusion between Karl Marx and Groucho Marx was fun, as was the endgame.

Overall, I recommend that you try the first part; it's a very good representative of the rest of the game, and that way you'll know if you like it.

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- verityvirtue (London), December 12, 2015

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Not revolutionary game design, but so what?, March 16, 2015
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

PGRTAG was one of the first games I played when I came back to text adventures and judged for IFComp 2010. It doesn't seem to break any theoretical ground or have grand arguments. It would be easy to disqualify as dashed off, and I suspected once I saw ten or so games like this, I wouldn't be so high on it.

But after testing and playing a lot of games, I still haven't found many that reached this level. In so many humor games, I see what they're trying to do, and I say good job, but this one's jokes are immersive. I was worried from the title that the game might be overdone, but it feels balanced right.

Though originally I figured, sure, I enjoyed it, but it's not going to last. I figured once I learned more and saw more, I'd be glad I played it and all, but I really need to learn from more sophisticated efforts.

It's several years later and I'm still coming back to it, though, while games that discuss structure are more over my head, or I don't feel as invited to learn from them, or I figured I got their lesson and I'd like to move on. This game does pretty much everything it wants to, right. It's a spontaneous affair, and it has those touches I wish I'd seen. The over the top narrative voice makes fun of, say, coffee shops and people who complain about them too much. The puzzle where Comrade Rosalia wants to share Communist Manifestos with the students but needs one for everyone is funny and sad bad-logic.

The end result for me is a very spontaneous game. You're invited to try silly stuff, and in fact the two paths through the game are very funny, and the alternate solutions let you use items differently. There's a best ending ((Spoiler - click to show)don't use the pawn shop) and a not-best, and they both make sense.

I think the community needs games like this, to keep us all grounded, or to remember that you don't have to be academic to sort old ideas into new stuff, or even to enter into Interesting Arguments (all arguments between NPCs in the game are suitably ludicrous.) I mean, when I read about reworkings of an old myth or whatever, I can't really mark that as superior to something like this, which pastes silly tropes and leaves you feeling, yes, it's okay to write silly stuff and want to.

On the downside, there's some guess the verb ((Spoiler - click to show)POINT device at X) and some annoying disambiguation among devices, where you have three "(long name)" device to choose from. But the game's short enough, it's not a huge deal.

Sadly, I haven't seen the author again. I hope they come back. Even a game half as good would be very welcome. When someone writes a game like this, it's easy to feel they can just dash off another. But it's not so easy to find that big-idea sweet spot and execute it. Still, as a blueprint for writing something very funny, it's hard to beat PGRTAG.

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- DJ (Olalla, Washington), May 9, 2013

- Zepton (Canada), April 6, 2013

- Tiberoo, March 26, 2013

- pcbrannon, February 24, 2013


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