Hobbiton Recall

On the tin, this looks to be a weird beast: a puzzly mix between Total Recall and The Hobbit. Now I’m the last person who should worry about weird genre mix-ups, so I gave it a go.

Would you believe this is my first Gruescript game I’ve ever played? I was delighted by the IF presentation, which is near-but-different to games like Monkey Island with the set of verbs and then objects to click. Here the objects tell you what commands you have available. I ascribed a bunch of the novelty to JD Bardi, but half goes to Gruescript. I want to see more using it!

JD wasn’t absent though - there’s clearly a lot of love poured into the game and its presentation. It’s nicely colourful and with many neat embellishments. However, I could tell that JD Bardi is a relative outsider to the IF Community. It’s the little tells --- the IF Comp blurb is long and a discussion rather than an attempt to woo a reviewer to play their game; the game is described as inspired by ZX Spectrum text games and point-and-click ones; there’s AI art even though that’s quite unpopular around the IF Comp-adjacent community; there’s an advertisement for the author’s web design job mid-game... These all felt a little awkward but were understandable.

I played the game and got stuck at the same place many others did ((Spoiler - click to show)the hospital). Unfortunately the comp blurb suggested that they had bug-tested the game and it was completable. The walkthrough peters out before this point, so perhaps it wasn’t able to be completed. An awkward mistake, fixed by the monkey patch suggested by the forum, or at least a bugfix release. I’ve been in the same position and it sucks.

There were a few elements in the game that I felt you get one free mistake, and every time thereafter is a bit of a ding. The less egregious one was the old trope of solving unmotivated puzzles blocking your progress. For example as you are trying to get ready and out of the house, you need to find your house keys. There’s a hedgehog who needs to be fed food scraps from a nearby bin, and once you do, you find your house keys. Weird puzzle, okay. But then soon after there’s a similar situation in the same location with a cat on the shed roof.

The element that put me off the most was the casual misogyny regarding the character’s wife. I could allow the looks-like-Andy-Capp’s-wife characterisation as a nod to the era, but there is a laundry list of little injustices the game lobs her way, for no real reason. The casual cruelty sucked a lot of energy from the otherwise fun presentation. I’d be happy with a growing progression of some earned animosity over the game — as a nod to Sharon Stone’s character in Total Recall — but that’s not what the game seems to worry about. As a result, it feels like a game not of modern times.

In the end, I got to play a bunch of a slice-of-life, limited puzzle game, but missed out on any deep Total Recall/Lord of the Rings content. I’m okay with the former, but was hoping for the latter.

I enjoyed the enthusiasm of the game and while I wouldn’t want to dampen that, I think it could have done with an external barometer of some testers, both for completion and tone. I hope to see more from JD Bardi.