Gone Out For Gruyere

I beta tested this game.

In this game, you are bullied by cheese. In a bizarre twist, you find yourself in a sort of pocket-dimension blocked by an enormous, rude wheel of Gruyere cheese.

There are eight corridors leading from the cheese, each heading to a different area containing useful items.

Some of the puzzles can be pretty tricky in this game, and some of the concepts can be very difficult to puzzle out (like what exactly is the nature of the (Spoiler - click to show)'hole' you find). But it's compact nature means that there are only so many things you can try before finding the solution. I found this game to be pretty amusing!

For those of you have played Bill's two large old school offerings - "Bullhockey!" and "Bullhockey2: The Return Of The Leather Whip" "Gone Out For Gruyere" will come as a surprise.

In this game your girlfriend from the previous offerings sends you out on a mission to buy the eponymous fermented curd (you'd think after rescuing her more than once in the two previous games she would have gone out to get it herself!)

I helped to beta test this one and I really liked the surreal nature of the game (a manoeuvrable hole plays a large part) as does manipulation of a Heath Robinson type of machine.

There are nods towards a more conventional style of film noir narration (the dude with the cigarette could have come from Make It Good) and a red herring or two along the way. There are other NPCs with whom you will also have to interact to complete the game and they are all well delineated.

I have not come across any bugs in the corrected version and the game is blissfully free of inventory limits and misspellings.

There is also an interesting twist at the end of the game when you have acquired the cheese.

I would thouroughly recommend it although prepare to set aside at least a couple of hours as it isn't easy!

Gone Out For Gruyere is a fun puzzlefest. In this one, you're stuck in a room with a giant cheese mocking you every time you move. It's pretty obnoxious, and your goal is to get rid of the darn thing. There are eight directions you can go, each connecting to a single room with one or two things of interest. Rooms will close off once you've done everything there is to do in them, which helps keep it more manageable.

I had one problem with this game, where I got locked out of an item I was supposed to use. (Spoiler - click to show)I multiplied the rope, but left the room without shrinking it, so I wasn't able to go in and get it back. I had to restart the game for that. I was also unsure about how the game drifts into more abstract concepts later on, which made it a bit harder to understand and visualize. Despite this, I managed to reach the end, which was pretty satisfying.

The funny concept of this game and the variety of vignettes you can enter make it worth checking out. Definitely play around with it.