MAD WARRIOR

Mad Warrior

I played this one around 9 or 10 times. I eventually tried editing the json file that Mr Patient mentioned in his ifdb review (when you save), which showed me that all the game code is in your appdata folder, and perusing the code was way more fun than playing the game.

Like Epistemophilia, this game seems written by someone disconnected from the mainstream of IF who simply pursued their passion without knowledge of things that would smooth player experience.

It's a dungeon crawl, breaking barrels and chests for potions and keys while equipping weapons and attack bats. It's kind of like Diablo but with less story and variety. There are 24 floors of the dungeon.

It's held back really hard by its clunky system. What's implemented is fairly smooth, it's just that it's infuriatingly tedious. Almost every room has items. When you pick up the item, you have to open your bag first. To leave the room, you have to close it. Sometimes, your bag is full. Did the author playtest the full game? Did they open and close the bag 256 times and think, "This is what players will love?" I'm sorry that I'm being rude, but playing your own game multiple times is a great test. If it's not fun for you to play, or you find yourself adding ways to skip things, then players won't really enjoy it either.

Editing the JSON let me see more. At lower levels, there are bosses, and defeating them heals you and gives you more inventory space.

Some enemies inflict status effects that can only be healed with specific items. In worst case scenarios you can use an escape rope to get to the top to buy a bandage or antidote or heal. Dying is more likely.

Combat is randomized. Some exits are weird. There's one room you go INTO on the 2nd floor, but going OUT puts you in a room you have to go OUT of again and puts you on the first floor with no way back.

Overall, I found things pretty over-tuned in the difficult direction and tedious. If the bag open/close thing were removed I'd instantly increase my rating for the game. I just can't get what the reasoning is. It can't be realism; it's really easy to have a bag semi open you can slip things in and out of. And realism would mean that to drink potions we'd have to OPEN POTION and DROP BOTTLE and in between we would OPEN MOUTH and SWALLOW. I really doubt it's for code reasons; if that were the case, we could just silently add routines to OPEN BAG before TAKEing anything and CLOSE BAG afterwards.

There are hints of a story, and the characters near the bottom are more interesting.

You've already played this game many times. You go down into the dungeon as a weakling with minimal equipment. You kill monsters in randomized turn-based combat and upgrade your gear and stats as you go. You keep doing this until you get to the bottom and defeat the final boss.

This particular version of the trope has a few quirks. In order to TAKE anything (not GET, which is not recognized), your bag must be open and have room. You have to close the bag before you can move. You have to manually equip stuff in each hand. It's tedious, but you get used to it after a while.

Weirdly, the game didn't display properly for me even though it's a Windows executable and I'm running Windows:

←[38;2;240;154;82mDUNGEON SURFACE←[0m
←[38;2;232;189;88m←[38;2;232;189;88mTHE JAWS OF THE ←[38;2;237;142;173mDUNGEON←[0m←[38;2;232;189;88m CLENCH BENEATH YOU.
WOLF-LIKE WINDS SLICE YOUR SENSES.
A TEMPEST OF GOD'S TEARS WHIP VIOLENTLY,
DRENCHING YOU AS THUNDER RUMBLES IN THE DISTANCE.←[0m←[38;2;232;189;88m←[0m←[0m

There's one more noteworthy feature, which I'll hide for anyone intending to take this game as a serious challenge: (Spoiler - click to show)when you save the game it helpfully lets you know that the state is being kept in a JSON file. I was reminded of Simon Christiansen's Trapped in Time, which deliberately tempted players to cheat. I played MAD WARRIOR straight for about an hour and seven levels' worth of rooms before granting myself some major quality-of-life improvements and speeding things to a conclusion. Without that, I think it would have taken five or six hours to complete.