Zombie Eye

The first one the randomizer gave me is actually one I tested: a short (5-minute) parser game about dealing with the eponymous Zombie Eye in a dimly-lit London Underground station. The pixel-art graphics are very fitting, and I’m not sure if this is the default look for Adventuron games or a stylistic choice by the author, but the bright colors and monospace font give it a retro look that I really liked. I was told during testing that the game restarting every time it ends is a standard part of Adventuron too, but this game made it part of the story, and I always love it when games make use of features of the medium like that.

Without spoiling anything, I liked the plot, and liked how it tied in to the puzzles. This is a very short game, but in that space it tells the story it wants to tell, and the implementation is solid. I did run into a few guess-the-verb difficulties, but the author provided a verb list and a walkthrough for exactly that purpose.

I do have two main criticisms. First is that it’s a bit too short; I would have liked a bit more puzzling before the final reveal, but I’m also not sure how I would have worked that into the story. Second, given how few puzzles there are, a more detailed implementation of those puzzles would have been nice, with more responses to incorrect approaches. But all in all this is just what I’m looking for in a Petite Mort game: short, sweet, and spooky.

This is a pretty surreal Adventuron game with images and a little music about confronting a giant Zombie eye in the London Underground. It involves a lot of sensory details, including sound and touch, in ways I found pretty poetic.

Dee Cooke is perhaps the adventuron author I know best, having made several excellent games before and winning or placing high in a lot of comps. I was surprised when this game was so small, then impressed when I realized it was in the 'made in 4 hours' division instead of the 'longer than 4 hours' division it seemed like it was in. This is pretty great for a speed-IF, with conversation, a reactive NPC, and graphics and sound.

Overall, it's a nice little treat with good atmosphere and some perspective shifts.

Tiny Adventuron parser adventure in which you try to rid the world of the titular monstrosity. A one-puzzle, one-room game, nicely illustrated with blocky graphics and some basic sound-effects. Uses the Adventuron "house style" - the look & feel of a 1980s BBC microcomputer. I managed to get stuck right at the start (the convenient VERBS command was enough to unblock me) but was smooth sailing from that point on.