Their First Meeting

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.

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!

TFM features two main puzzles, classical ones you likely have seen before. Not the "wolf goat cabbage", liar/truth-teller, find the wrong-weight pebble or logic grid sense, but technological discoveries. This is a good choice for the tutorial, especially since there is a story woven in with them. A mysterious woman takes you to her hut, and you need to make fire. There are magic gems which aren't explained but definitely give motivation to see what they're there for. There's even tension over whether this woman is hostile. You don't know much about her, not even her name!

All this is promising, especially with only four rooms, where it's pretty clear where you need to do what. The graphics, too, suggest nothing tricky needs to be done. They'er functional, and I don't mean that as a backhanded compliment. A river has fish. A future fire pit has rocks nearby. Cut-scenes have you sitting with your new acquaintance. The story isn't very florid, so florid graphics aren't needed.

But things break down a bit with the parser. TFM seems to try to establish confusion, but gives a litany of "what are you thinking?! Come on" or (paraphrased) Geez, flaky, focus there, which probably weren't intended to heckle the player, but it feels that way. Then there are a lot of fourth-wall clues like "you can probably figure out what to do here." Where I had, but I hadn't figured out the exact language.

Combine that with the tutorial that only shows up if you ask for it at the start or type TUTORIAL, and I felt left out on an island. And the thing is: there shouldn't be much confusion with starting a fire. There's some guessing verbs (I tried COOK FISH when the right verb was ROAST,) and in one case SIT TABLE gives the generic error where SIT works. TFM recognizes some synonyms, but this seemed like the ideal place to have *match "_ ROPE"* syntax to let the player know they're on the right track.

The second part is a more recent technology than fire. It's all in the room description in the cave, what you need, but the problem is that the graphic and text combine to take up more than one full screen. A chance was missed here to highlight (or have the option to) the things that were useful. GREEN for what you can use, YELLOW for what's used later, maybe. As it was, it wasn't enough to get a parser error when something didn't work, because I couldn't quite trust the parser.

Creating fire (and a meal) and the other technology both lead to a cut-scene which suggests a magic world. It was a legitimately good reward for the puzzles beyond not having to fight the parser, and it suggests the author would have nailed things down if they'd just have known. (The game lists testers, too.)

I replayed TFM after winning, because it did have a good enough story, and also because I wanted to try an experiment. How much could I remember of the verbs I needed to guess? I missed a few. It would have been smoother with a little more testing and a better narrative voice/internal dialogue, which unfortunately might serve to chase newer players away (an option for harsh or helpful mode would've been neat!) But it deserves credit for its ambition.