Number of Reviews: 2
Write a review Nice story, needs a little more polish, May 31, 2024Their 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.
