Carma

Baf's Guide

The main idea of this game is, before starting writing anything (be it a novel or an adventure game), the author should learn how to properly use the main tool of the trade - namely, the language. Since this postulate is brought home to the player not always by means of humane methods, it's recommended for the player to possess a sense of humour, a tolerance to critique, and the ability not to take her/himself too seriously. Some of the people also might be scared away by the rather unusual puzzles (one of them, for instance, represents none other than a grammar test), and some railroading. Those who decide to play Carma despite the aforementioned issues, will be rewarded with great graphic effects of highest quality (the word "effects" is an understatement; I'd call this work "a semi-graphic adventure", rather than a "text adventure", or even "illustrated text adventure"). Also, a couple of episodes were real masterpieces, which I'm never going to forget.

-- Valentine Kopteltsev

>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction

This game depicts the clashes between a wanna-be writer and the punctuation that said writer has heinously abused throughout his/her career. In fact, the primary complainant is an outraged comma, and that comma's chief grievance is, you guessed it, splices. What can I say? It's my kind of game. Even better, it's done quite well, on the whole.

Carma uses the graphics and sound capabilities of Glulx to delightful effect, especially in its charming illustrations of punctuation marks dressed up to suit various occasions. One of my favorite scenes occurs when you ask the comma about splices. Suddenly, the scene dissolves, to reform as the archetypal spaghetti western town. Ennio Morricone's theme from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly wafts over the speakers. We see graphics of a variety of punctuation marks, dressed up as stereotypical Western characters, and the comma (in cowboy hat and serape, naturally) marches towards you, ready for a duel to the death. It's hilarious.

SPAG
Unfortunately, I found little enjoyment in Carma outside of the whizzbang multimedia, and I guess I'm still old-fashioned enough to feel that that's missing the point of Interactive Fiction. The biggest problem was simply the *lack* of interactivity: I felt like I was spending over half my time in cut scenes (note to authors: please make cut scenes skippable!), and the interactive parts were not well-fleshed out. The "strike" scene was particularly tedious--interview X, ask X about X, ask X about sign, ask X about demands, repeat N times.
-- Suzanne Britton
See the full review

- View the most common tags (What's a tag?)

Edit Tags

Cancel

Tags you added are shown below with checkmarks. To remove one of your tags, simply un-check it.
Enter new tags here (use commas to separate tags):

Delete Tags

Cancel

5 star: (1) 4 star: (4) 3 star: (3) 2 star: (1) 1 star: (0)

Average Rating: Number of Reviews: 1 Write a review

This is a pretty fun comic to watch, but has very little interactivity. It worked for me in-browser.

It's essentially an animated comic about a comma who really doesn't like you. In each scene, you can mostly wait until the next scene, but you can also try a few basically well-cued actions. There is a scene or two, though, with really badly cued actions.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  

More Options

Promote this user

Demote this user

Plonk this user

Flag spoilers

Flag as inappropriate

Direct link

View my user filters

Explain these options

 | Add a comment 

Related Games

Polls