Reefer Island

This is interesting. To the best of my knowledge, the author didn't announce this game on the newsgroups; I hadn't heard of it at all until a friend and I looking for something to play stumbled across it on Baf's.

As you might guess from the title, it's a game about the quest for your next bong hit. With a premise like that I expected a rather half-baked short comedy game, but in fact it's an old-school puzzle-fest with a spacious map. We ran into some weird moments in the coding, but it showed a reasonable amount of work.

The puzzles themselves are very old-fashioned in character: a lot of them (at least in the portion I saw) seemed to entail finding the right object to give to the NPC to get another object to use to get a key... [etc], often through fairly long and convoluted chains. There is what appeared to be a genuine maze, though we didn't persist long enough to get it fully mapped. There are improbable leaps of logic and NPCs who seem able to teleport across the map just in order to prevent you from doing things. It's that sort of game, and you either get into the mood and enjoy it, or you don't.

I mostly did, actually, and we might have finished it, or at least gone further, if it weren't for the bewildering openness of the game. Many many locations and puzzles are simultaneously accessible from the outset, so we wandered around for a long time before deciding that we were either stuck or insufficiently directed. And the game has both hunger and sleep timers turned on, as well as the occasional message about how long it's been since you last had any marijuana. It's very easy to die before you've really gotten your bearings or figured out how to get your food source. When this happened to us, we became discouraged and gave up. I could easily see someone enjoying this piece if they were on an old-school nostalgia kick (and not too hung up about the drug-use messages). The writing is good-spirited. There are monkeys.