Go to the game's main page
Review
This is a game made using, I think, RPG maker, not the first IFComp game with that engine (the same author made Quest for the Sword of Justice).
The idea is that your teacup has been stolen and you want to retrieve it. You can opt not too, getting a bad ending. In fact, there are a lot of bad endings!
Most text games don't have the features found in this game, so when I rate it in ifcomp and on ifdb I'll focus on the features it has in common with text games, which I'll describe next. Then I'll describe the features not common to text games.
The writing is witty, some of the funniest to me in the whole competition. The lampshading of the silliness of the quest, the banter, is just great to me. The characters and settings constantly escalate (I like the 'Swamp of Instant Death' or whatever it's name was). There are enough options to feel like I had at least some freedom, some opportunity to express my personality.
For the non-IF parts:
The ultra-HD tileset used looked weird to me. It was kind of in the uncanny valley.
Having to wait for the character to move between each interaction drove me nuts. I blanked out and five minutes later I had been scrolling through Twitter, and tried to remember what I was doing, and realized I had clicked out of this game a while ago to wait for the animation to finish, and came back to it. I steeled myself to continue, but after accidentally picking the wrong option in Satan's house due to relentlessly hitting the 'skip' button (which for some reason is the same as the 'choose option' button), and running into two long combats in the forest in a row, I quit, since I had already seen 2 or 3 endings. I am completely uninterested in games incorporating long animations between text like this. I don't think that would make the author feel bad, as Damon Wakes is brilliant and has done a lot of different media, often to provoke specific responses from readers or judges, so I think getting a strong reaction to the game's techniques would be a positive thing.
Very funny text though. I would definitely read the rest of the game if I didn't have to watch any more animations.
