Ba'Roo!

I do want to fine-tune the game and all input would be appreciated (maybe not liked, but appreciated). Check out the ADRIFT forum website and PM me with suggestions/comments/bugs/complaints. The idea of including the map was not to “make things easy”, but like the Infocom games of old, having “feelies”. I'm working on a "Hint book" similar to ZORK era which includes, "Did you try ..." for the fun of it. I will zip all together when the final revision is complete.

For example, did you try to...
(Spoiler - click to show)- ignore the wizard and go off on your own.
- kill the wizard another way.
- kill the warlock. (one way is an early death!)
- kiss the warlock.
- drift down the river and look around.

This game suffers from serious guess-the-verb. The game mechanics are also a bit problematic. In some games, you can easily get locked out of a good ending. This is the case in this game. The problem, however, is that sometimes you are locked out and the game immediately ends, while other times you are left thinking that you could succeed…only to realize that you cannot. If you are going to allow the possibility of a player getting locked out of the game, at least be consistent (either end the game there or not, please).

The puzzles, though very interesting, are poorly implemented. This is mostly due to the overwhelming presence of guess-the-verb. For example, you might have to type, say, ‘kill john with knife’ instead of ‘kill john’ or ‘stab john’ even if a knife is your only weapon. In other parts, you get to play guess-the-noun. There are clear cases of a room description telling me ‘X is here,’ but when I examine X, I get the response ‘You see no such thing.’ That is maddening. In addition, disambiguation problems increase one’s frustration.

Like the puzzles, the storyline is also interesting but ill-implemented. The problem is pacing; the author must ensure that the player doesn’t receive information at the wrong time. I stumbled upon a text dump which was probably intended to be seen after some preliminary dumps. I could not understand what was going on because it was like I had walked in during the second half of a movie. In text adventures, the author has to make sure the player doesn’t get to the second half before trudging through the first (unless unconventional temporal order is intended).

I couldn’t finish this game. The difficulty did not bother me. The story was not unbearable. I’m afraid it was poor game mechanics that did me in. One puzzle requires the use of an item that is never mentioned, alluded to, or examined. I’m sorry, but this just will not do.