Their First Meeting

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Average Rating:

This game was written in Adventuron for the Text Adventure Literacy Jam.

The idea is that you've stolen or smuggled some gems that have a mysterious glow and power. You find someone to report this to, a woman in the woods, but instead of listening to you she requires you to carry out some basic tasks for her first.

The game is both easy and hard. It is easy because the room description constantly updates to tell you what to do next. There are only two puzzle sequences.

It is hard because of three reasons:
1-The game only allows two word input, but has many puzzles involving combining two items. So while you might think 'tie rope to wood' would make sense, you have to find a way to do that in two words. Tie rope? Tie wood? Combine rope? You'll have to guess. But there are also at least two points where the solution requires 3 words, which are the only points in the game its available.
2-Implementation is spotty, so many objects are mentioned but can't be examined (like a sack of fluff), or can be taken but not examined, or can be examined but don't show up if taken.
3-The game has aggressive or insulting messages for all of its messages, along the lines of 'What are you doing, you fool?' or swearing at the player.

Combined, this means that you spend most of the game guessing the right word combination while the game yells at you in bright red text over and over.

On the plus side, the game's worldbuilding and plot are interesting. I think that relaxing the two-word parser and allowing more complex inputs, together with implementing more synonyms, would make the game pretty fun!

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Their First Meeting is a short Adventuron game, part of a wider lore created by the author (which you don’t need to know anything about - the story is well introduced). There are two main puzzle sequences, the first slightly more straightforward than the second.

The tutorial, such as it is, is basically a short ‘how to play’ text. I would have preferred this to be integrated into the gameplay.

Object and scenery implementation is a bit light and patchy - I’ll give this a pass as it’s the author’s first game, but it’s often unclear what is actually an interactable object as the custom ‘you can’t do that’ messages are a bit obtuse. There are often cases where you can’t interact with an object until you’re at a certain point in the puzzle chain - I don’t mind this at all, but it could do with better ‘wait till later!’ hinting.

The main issue is guess-the-verb/guess-the-noun - allowing for a few synonyms would make this a much more enjoyable experience. I was really banging my head against the screen in a lot of cases, especially during the more complex second puzzle sequence.

I already mentioned the custom ‘you can’t do that’ messages - customising these is of course preferable to the standard Adventuron response, especially as it’s done here to fit in better with the writing style, but after a while I did get a bit sick of the tone as it felt like the game was telling me off or calling me stupid for trying things. I don’t think this would have been a problem if there weren’t so many guess-the-verb issues as mentioned above.

Overall, though, it’s a nice little story and with a bit of testing and polish (and a better integrated tutorial) would hold up well as a TALP game. As it is, beginners might find it a bit hard.

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