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Number of Ratings: 56
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- Ben Treat (Maine, USA), July 8, 2012
- stadtgorilla (Munich, Germany), April 17, 2012
4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
Utterly Charming, March 27, 2012Play it if: you're in the mood for some distraction and a bit of light humor that plays off some lovely caricatures of communism and capitalism.
Don't play it if: you're in the mood for intellectual challenge or satire that's actually razor-sharp instead of soft, warm, and fluffy.
The People's Glorious Revolutionary Text Adventure Game can only be encapsulated in the word "charming". The whole game is filled with a kind of whimsy you can find in the old Monkey Island puzzle-solving games: some light satire, a bit of caricature, and a young, plucky would-be hero.
There are really three levels to the humor here. The first is the caricatured viewpoint of the main character (appropriately named Karl). It's great fun to read the verbose and melodramatic descriptions given to vile dens of capitalism (e.g. a coffee joint) and glorious artifacts of the Revolution (e.g. your hat). The second is the ridiculously simplistic tools and methods you're expected to use to overcome capitalism - among them the Ventriloquator, a device which forces its target to spout Marxist slogans. The third level is the fact that the world actually bears out the logic of these methods. The capitalist world is just as surreal as Karl's mind, from the government bureaucrat's behavior to the bizarrely simple steps which will supposedly collapse the government and implode the economy to achieve Revolution.
The only real complaint I have about the game is its lack of ambition. For all its charm, the game feels a bit too short, and one gets the feeling that The People's Glorious Revolutionary Text Adventure Game could have taken its cues from the previously-mentioned LucasArts puzzle-solving games to expand the setting and the story a little.
Still, The People's Glorious Revolutionary Text Adventure Game (boy, am I getting tired of typing that out) is a solid game with no discernible gameplay hitches. This would make a good easy distraction and an excellent beginner's introduction to interactive fiction.
P.S. Oh, and the soundtrack on the author's website is brill. Good touch, Taylor!
- Hannes, November 12, 2011
- o0pyromancer0o, September 21, 2011
- dacharya64, September 3, 2011
- Sam Kabo Ashwell (Seattle), July 20, 2011
- WaterMonkey314, June 26, 2011
- JohnW (Brno, Czech Republic), March 16, 2011
- Shigosei, March 3, 2011
3 of
7 people found the following review helpful:
Harmless, February 16, 2011Well-polished low-difficulty puzzlers with little artistic ambition: that might well be the new "standard" for interactive fiction. Although they do little to move the medium forward, and don't exactly give you food for thought, such games are certainly pleasant. "Entertainment not frustration" is the guiding idea. And it's good entertainment. With only slight reservations I would say that the two highest ranking games from this years' IF Competition (Aotearoa and Rogue of the Multiverse) fall into this category.
The People's Glorious Revolutionary Text Adventure Game, which placed a very respectable 7th, certainly does. In this piece, a man called Karl has the task to start a communist revolution in a fictitious American city. You are provided with a list of revolutionary goals, which you can set out to achieve in any order. Each of them will require you to solve a puzzle, which is generally not very hard. If you do get stuck, there is an in-game hint system and a single-use device which allows you to bypass any puzzle in the game. In keeping with the tone of the story, the logic of the game slightly absurd; this is generally not a problem, but one or two puzzle solutions do not make a lot of sense. All in all, this is a game that even someone new to IF could successfully complete.
But let's get back to the tone of the game. It is very light-hearted, so light-hearted in fact that it has become lighter than air and now floats far above all real political problems. In this game, being a communist equals having a name like "Jetski" and feeling pride when you see the hammer-and-sickle; while being a capitalist means that you worship Reagan and believe that life is a book by Horatio Alger. Now you don't have to be serious about political issues: from at least the time of Aristophanes, authors have known that comedy is a great genre for taking on big problems. But The People's Glorious Revolutionary Text Adventure Game is not even satire. Its jokes have no bite. It is harmless.
There are so many ways in which interesting political commentary could have been inserted into this game! But the farthest the author goes is to make fun of one particularly unlikely the rags-to-richness story. Not even Glenn Beck would be offended by that. (Alger, Beck: this is the point where I want to be praised for my encyclopedic knowledge of US culture! :D Though perhaps I should have been spending my time with Faulkner or Melville or some other good stuff.) This is a missed opportunity. Because The People's Glorious Revolutionary Text Adventure Game mentions but does not engage serious issues, its shallowness becomes bothersome.
One could go as far as to argue that any work which reduces political disagreement to harmless humour is thereby strengthening the status quo -- in this case, neo-liberal capitalism -- and thus not harmless. But the extremely slight satire of capitalism that can be found in The People's Glorious Revolutionary Text Adventure Game is probably enough to counterbalance this. Even from this perspective, then, this game is completely harmless.
In conclusion: this game is a fun diversion. It is also nothing more.
- Ben Cressey (Seattle, WA), February 14, 2011
7 of
8 people found the following review helpful:
Concise, with a lovely, dry wit, February 14, 2011I think that I'm going to have to add this to my collection of "gateway games," with which to introduce new players to IF. It's a quick play, reasonably well-hinted, with built-in hints available that should minimize frustration. Almost all puzzles have multiple solutions and yet the same objects can be used to solve multiple puzzles, so there aren't a whole pile of red herrings left around. However, aside from just being, as described, a well-designed game that works, it's a barrel of fun to play, if you enjoy its dry wit. It's very well-written, and I think one of the only reasons it's not up for a best-writing XYZZY (other than that I didn't get around to putting in nominations, to be fair) this year is that its light-hearted writing is more fun than evocative, per se. The story is engaging, and many of the responses brought a smile to my face. It's also very rare that I'll play a game multiple times, but I'm keen on trying to play through this one again looking for an alternate ending. Overall, I recommend this one quite a bit.
- ifwizz (Berlin, Germany), January 2, 2011
- Bernie (Fredericksburg, VA), December 19, 2010
- Simon Christiansen (Denmark), December 10, 2010
- Kevin Jackson-Mead (Boston), November 27, 2010
- Juhana, November 20, 2010
- Wendymoon, November 18, 2010
- Celestianpower (Gloucestershire, UK), November 17, 2010
- Mr. Patient (Saint Paul, Minn.), November 16, 2010
- Nusco (Bologna, Italy), November 16, 2010
- Mark Jones (Los Angeles, California), November 16, 2010
- perching path (near Philadelphia, PA, US), November 11, 2010
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