The HeBGB Horror!

Baf's Guide

A fun little game that blends the punk-rock club scene with Lovecraftian horror, often with amusing results. You're seeking a nameless chord lost deep within the bowels of a nightclub. The Alan parser isn't great, but it's good enough that you shouldn't need to guess the verb or the syntax often, and the writing is terrific--vivid and extremely funny in places. Some of the puzzles are a mite peculiar, and there are some rough spots, technically, but on the whole this is plenty of fun.

-- Duncan Stevens

>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction

The game combines the trappings of the Seventies New York punk rock scene with the sort of Lovecraftian pastiche that seems to have become all the rage in IF since the success of Anchorhead.

I'm an avid rock music fan, so the former theme grabbed me immediately. The Lovecraft stuff, on the other hand, gets old pretty fast. Mayer obviously knows and loves the music, and the emphasis is on the New York punk scene -- these themes could have sustained a game easily on their own. As I played through The HeBGB Horror!, I found myself really enjoying the punk parts, and wishing that the various "eldritch horrors" and such could have been edited out. I'm not sure how much the game wanted to parody CBGB, or how much of an homage it intended for the Lovecraft bits to be, but I think it may have achieved the opposite of its ambition, as the music parts felt mainly like homage, while the Lovecraftiana, with its various generic rats, tentacles, and gibbering masses, felt more like a parody.