Unease

Medieval High Tech Quest Adventure for those Not Easily Frustrated by Amateurs

I wrote this game AS I was learning TADS back in 2002. The exercise kept expanding until I figured it seemed like I had a game written. Probably I should never have foisted it upon the world, but I still kind of like it and think it worth a go.

It is not "porn" or even remotely close, I'd say. Not sure how it got billed like that. PG-13 maybe. There's a little humorous textual nudity (non-gratuitous, a woman in a towel; save early, save often!) at one point, but that's about it. As for genre, there isn't any clearly defined one. I'd say it is best described as Fantasy, sort of a Medieval High-Tech mish mash of a Quest/Adventure. NSA meets LOTR? I dunno.

I realize now that I had a lot to learn about game design and play. So, sometimes clues are obscure, and sometimes a wrong move can be a little too unforgiving to a player. And yeah, sometimes I think I made a few bits too difficult to puzzle out.

There's an undocumented WALKMETHRU command available wherever a standard prompt appears. At the beginning of the game, you have to enter a few conversational responses, and then the standard prompt becomes available. I thought this would make for a nice immersive beginning, but ha! probably not.

Frequent use of the LOOK and X commands is helpful.

My major problem with this game: too much seemed to be going on, and I didn't understand very much of it at all. There is a fantasy setting -- maybe -- except that some of the objects appear to be technological, rather than magical, so perhaps it is really an odd piece of SF, instead. There are peoples and individual persons with strange Fantasy Names, many of them at a time, whizzing past my head in conversations I only nominally exert any control over. There is conspiracy, disguise, revelation, a blatant pass from a serving wench, all crammed into a couple of moves, before I have had a chance to really get my bearings.

Then I wound up locked in a cell and drunk; the hints didn't give me enough information to figure out how to rescue myself from this problem; and after enough turns of swaying to and fro in drunken abandon, I gave up.

Again, the basic problem is that I know too little to be able to guess what my goal in the game is-- even in the short term, I know I want to get out of this cell and rescue my friend/girlfriend/potential lover/whatever, except that I have no clue how to go about this or why I was even locked up in the first place. Character involvement is also not deep enough, because I understand too little of what's going on with my PC to care a great deal about his dilemmas and desires. If I had a sufficient understanding of my goal, I might find it easier to keep playing; if I cared enough about my PC, I might keep going despite the difficulties. The combination of problems is what made me stop.

There might be something interesting going on here, but so far all I can really tell is that things are Weird. More time on the establishing material might have helped.