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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
A line cartoon caper, July 4, 2022
by jkj
Related reviews: parsercomp 2022

# Gent Stickman vs Evil Meat Hand: A line cartoon caper

by "A-Z"

> Interactive Fiction Parser Game WITHOUT TEXT, just hand drawing graphics.
> Gent Stickman, the drawing in the door of the gentleman toilets must go to save Lady, the drawing in the door of ladies toilet, kidnapped by the Evil Meat Hand.

This game draws line cartoon pictures instead of output text, but uses text input. Also with sound effects.

This is one of the most unusual games I've seen for a long time. It definitely deserves points for originality and style. And it's funny!

(Spoiler - click to show)
The mission to save the lady is made obvious from the start, but how to do it?

Playing the game involves immediate death whenever something is done wrong. This is made worse by the fact you have to start again from the beginning. This quickly becomes annoying and the system desperately needs an "undo" feature. Thankfully the game is quite short once the solution to a problem is known.

The user interface could use up arrow to re-edit last command.

The iterative help is interesting, it's pictorial and incremental. However, the initial hints tend to tell you what you already know. I had to use the hints in some places as the solutions are indeed obscure.

I wasted a lot of time trying to make use of the "death" character. However, it seems he is mostly there just to limit the geography, except obscurely right at the end.

There are a few problems:

* You can look left or look right (nice one), but from the top of the new tree, look left and you fall into the spike pit.

* Getting to the castle, eventually i found "jump to castle", whereas jump left or vault didn't work, i just died.

Some of the reaction pictures are hilarious, and there are many extras for things that aren't the expected input.

"call death" at the end is somewhat bogus. I tried this already to maybe chop the tree to bridge the pit, but that didn't work. Why now?

I really enjoyed playing this game. The cartoon graphics make it work despite any frustrations. If this presentation format were expanded and polished, it could be really quite good.



Conclusion: awesome but frustrating in places.

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