A Princess Saves a Dragon

This is an Adventuron game entered in the Text Adventure Literacy Jam.

It uses some pixel art which looks very detailed. I found out later that it was AI-generated, which would explain the lack of recurring characters.

The story is interesting and fun; a dragon has helped you, a princess, throughout your life, so when a prince asks you to marry him, the dragon helps you flee away. Now, you need to help your dragon while making friends with local fairies.

The map is not tiny but is easy to navigate, and it's easy to picture the room descriptions. The main NPCs have strong personalities, so that was fun.

There were definitely several bugs, as the author stated (due to lack of time). The weirdest to me was that there are supposed to be large crystals in the mine but instead they're listed at the pool, but you can't reference them with 'large' or 'crystals', instead you call them 'pool' and the game offers a disambiguation prompt between them and the real pool.

Similarly, there are several puzzles where you have to type things just right, like using 'jump on' instead of 'enter' or 'climb' or 'get on' or 'stand on'. This definitely could have used a longer testing period!

The game is a little rough around the edges from the off, but it has a great tutorial that ticks all the boxes.

This game uses choice options for dialogue, which I’m a big fan of. However, sometimes there’s only one choice, which is unnecessary.

The game design has some similarities with Tristin Grizel Dean’s Midsummer’s Eve from 2023 - in addition to the AI-generated fantasy graphics, it uses a similar menu line at the top of the screen where you can click on inventory, map and help functions rather than typing. The map function doesn’t seem to work though!

Unfortunately there were quite a few noticeable bugs the first time I played, and I eventually ran into a gamebreaking bug so couldn't finish.

A few weeks later I played again – there had been some bugfixes (though I still encountered occasional bugs) and I was able to finish it this time. The story has a nice satisfying end and a well-placed cue to save before the final puzzle!

Some really nice music has also been added (in fact I liked it so much that I left the game open and let it keep playing while I was trying other games). This contributes to the lovely atmosphere of the game in general.