Amazing Quest

by Nick Montfort profile

2020

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Number of Reviews: 13
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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
Boundary-pushing, but not in a good way., January 1, 2021
by Robin Johnson (Edinburgh, Scotland)
Related reviews: IFComp 2020

Look, I pride myself on not being a gatekeeper. I'm not up for arguments about what is or isn't IF, or a game. This is a game that tests that tolerance.

As far as I can tell, it's an infinite series of yes/no questions created procedurally from a small pool of random words ("you $ENCOUNTER_VERB a $ADJECTIVE $PLACE", do you $ACTION? (y/n)"), and your answers make no difference to it. It comes with a rather pretentious "introduction" and "strategy guide" which apparently serve to try to convince you that there's a deeper game in there, or that if you're good enough you'll enjoy this one.

It would be kind of cool that it was made for C64, and the documentation made on a mechanical typewriter, except that it doesn't make any use of the unique features of either technology.

EDIT, JANUARY 2021: I came across this gem of wisdom in a book about IF, and I can't help quoting it here -
"A program is not interactive fiction if it simply prints the same series of texts, or a random series of texts, in response to input, or if it outputs some transformation of the input string without understanding that string."
- "Twisty Little Passages", by Nick Montfort

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jcompton, January 4, 2021 - Reply
Surely we are just days away from the announcement of the "Past Nick Montfort Indicts Present Nick Montfort"-themed Game Jam.
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