A Quest Only For The Noble

Here's another entrant in the long line of games never betatested before release. How can I be that confident in such a statement? The first line has a typo. So does the third. Then there's the hyphenated soda-bottle, the run-on sentences, and missing capitalization. Things like this make me want to claw my eyes out, because it appears that the author couldn't bother to polish his prose, much less let anyone else play the game before unleashing it. It stinks of laziness.

Anyhow, the unnecessary tutorial appears out of nowhere, rewarding you without informing you what you're supposed to do, and then teleports in objects. At least it solves a bizarre puzzle which could otherwise only be explained by revealing that the PC had twisted and evil parents or that the PC had emotional issues.

The setup is a few notches better than "escape the room"; instead, it's "escape the house". You start off in your bedroom. The room descriptions are standard fare, with a bare minimum of atmosphere and occasionally wry insights. The detached cave-crawl perspective, however, tends to leave a lot of things up in the air. For instance, do you know the woman in the kitchen? Is she some stranger that just wandered in and started to make food? What about the girl in the living room, and why does she speak with a British accent? The perspective doesn't work in settings where you'd expect the PC to have some background knowledge. If Sara is his sister, why not just describe her initially as "your sister, Sara"? Such clues don't need to be paragraphs, but cluing in the player makes the game feel true to life.

The rest of the game is best described as an exercise in examining all objects and doing weird things with them. You're forced into this because purple prose is everywhere and because the game world makes no sense. Also, to compound the frustration, there aren't actually any inline hints.

Perhaps this game is winnable, but after 100 turns of increasing rage, I gave up. I have a suspicion that were I to succeed, though, the payoff would not be a sufficient recompense for my effort.