Captain Cutter's Treasure

by Garry Francis profile

Pirate
2021

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Number of Reviews: 4
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
By golly, Jolly Roger!, March 14, 2022
by Rovarsson (Belgium)

The beginning of this game has you waking up in the broom closet of the pub after a brawl. The first thing you see is some kind of nonsensical ransom note about a treasure you know nothing about.

Up to you to figure out what this means.

Captain Cutter's Treasure is a straightforward pirate-themed game which unashamedly ticks a lot of standard boxes. A hidden treasure, a coded map, a damsel in distress,...

Nothing original, but great fun to run around interrogating drunken sailors and exploring the coastal town.

The NPCs have quite a lot to say besides the requisite clues they have to offer. Spend a few minutes with each one to find out what he or she thinks about the rest of the characters.

There is a definite appeal in the portrayal of the coastal town. It feels a bit like a LEGO model of a pirate adventure. All the necessary locations are there, and it doesn't take much to build a much larger world in your imagination from the few morsels of worldbuilding you are given.

The puzzles are easy when taken alone. The harder (but not really hard) part is to figure out how to get the optimal ending. It's no trouble at all to hunt around until you reached all three endings. Once you know the town and have talked to everyone the first time, it's a matter of minutes to do the preparations before trying a new path toward victory.

And now I'm going to rebuild my son's LEGO pirate ship. Arrr!

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Return treasure, rescue girl, and ... do better next time, if you want, May 31, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

Captain Cutter's Treasure (CCT) is an impressive, small game. A pirate's daughter has been kidnapped. The ransom is some hidden treasure. You have to find and return it. There's a map to put together, and ... a bit more. But not too much.

The game has a respectable dialogue system that helps you flesh out as much of the story as you want to. There's even a very small puzzle that crosses genres into (Spoiler - click to show)Sokoban, and while you can put the game into an unwinnable state this way, it's relatively clear what to do without feeling dumb and obvious. I was more baffled with how to open a locked door, though when I thought through it, I realized I missed a few clues.

The game has three possible endings that I counted, and since doing the obvious right thing gets the "only okay" ending, there's some interesting meta/detective work. I think I got lucky (Spoiler - click to show)distracting Barnaby when he was on watch--I understood what to do but didn't have as good an idea of the ship's map as I did of the warehouse. Maybe it was just dealing with fore and aft. But it was pleasing to figure out what should generally happen.

This was a really good experience, well-organized and without a lot of red herrings. I'm not surprised

There are some issues of having to disambiguate more than you should need to for the parser, but I think that's more a function of people getting comfortable with programming PunyInform than any serious shortcomings. Besides, there's always the up-arrow on Frotz. So I think this is worth fighting through, and knowing this in advance will hopefully ensure that if you play CCT, you'll be able to see all CCT has to offer.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A compact pirate puzzle game, May 9, 2021
by MathBrush
Related reviews: about 1 hour

This game is part of the PunyInform competition. It's fairly polished, and features an quest to go looking for pirate treasure.

In the tradition of classic adventure games, the puzzles don't really make much sense, but they're fun. One involves a 2d block pushing puzzle (easier than the infamous Royal Puzzle from Zork III, but generally similar), and there are some math and logic puzzles.

The game has two endings, one easy to achieve and another harder. The game eschews walkthroughs and hints, but I decompiled the game to find the 'good' ending, which is significantly harder.

The largest negative in the game is the pedantry. Very frequently the game knows exactly what you want to do but forces you to phrase yourself a different way.

Examples include:

">UNLOCK BOX

I think you wanted to say “unlock wooden box with something”. Please try again."

and

">ROW
I think you wanted to say “row something”. Please try again."

A particularly egregious example (spoilers for the 'good ending'):

(Spoiler - click to show)
> lock chest
I think you wanted to say “lock treasure chest with something”. Please try again

> lock chest with golden key
Sorry, I don’t understand what “golden” means.

> lock chest with gold key
First you’d have to close the treasure chest.

> close chest
You close the treasure chest.


This is the equivalent of eating at a restaurant but the chef occasionally grabs your hands to make you move your knife to the other side or to drop your salad fork and take your regular one, to ensure that you are eating the meal in the proper way.

Overall, I think this will please people who primarily look for IF to have fun scenarios and puzzles that aren't immediately solvable but are fair.

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
What shall we do with the drunken sailor?, May 5, 2021
by jakomo
Related reviews: punyjam1

A puzzle-filled pirate-themed adventure: the local publican's daughter has been kidnapped by nasty pirates. To rescue her, you'll need to uncover the mystery of their stolen treasure. Lots of intricate details implemented here: chatty NPCs who respond to lots of conversation topics, a pirate ship that requires nautical directions to navigate, a very cool imprisonment-and-escape sequence. Everything exudes an appropriate 1700s-era flavour. Puzzles aren't easy: I couldn't get past the crate puzzle in the warehouse, which sadly brought an abrupt end to the fun.

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