Adventurer's Consumer Guide

ACG is a moderate-sized piece, well-tested, with a wide variety of responses to unusual conditions. It's unabashedly a puzzle game -- the premise is a bit thin and the story is minimal -- but what it does, it does very well. The puzzles are generally fair, and many are quite ingenious: the objects you've been given at the beginning of the game can be used in a satisfying variety of ways. Very few of the puzzles felt at all shopworn or perfunctory.

The attention to detail is also excellent. There are a number of easter eggs and special endings -- while there's only one way to really win, the alternate semi-loss conclusions are great fun to read.

One thing that many players are likely to find surprising is the absence of response to EXAMINE: Thorsby eschews object descriptions entirely. Everything you need to know about a thing will be evident from its room description and inventory listing. (On the other hand, this makes for some very long inventory lists...)

As a staunch puzzle-lover, I find no greater joy than discovering an IF game that presents unique puzzles. The puzzles in Adventurer's Consumer Guide are both fun and fair (with the exception of, possibly, one puzzle that sent me to the walkthru). The game inspires trust, so that when you feel stuck you will be generally willing to walk around and try various things rather than resorting to a walkthru, especially since the various things you will try will have logical and often hilarious results. In total, it probably took me about 4 hours to solve the game.

The game has a light-hearted tone, poking fun at dungeon-crawling cliches. I did notice a small number of typos in some room descriptions and occasionally I was unable to locate objects I had dropped. This may be due to the fact that the author eschews the verbs "examine" and "search", which results in the "look" command dumping an enormous amount of information in certain instances and makes the "inventory" command a bit unwieldy at times. Although I did miss the ability to examine objects more closely, the lack of this ability didn't detract from my enjoyment of the game. And I must give the author significant credit for creating a puzzle game without using the standard "search" and "examine" verbs.

In this game, you play a reviewer for the Adventurer Consumers Guide. You are asked to review such things as a helmet that makes you a hero and an orb that traps anyone you hit it with. You are trying everything out on a treasure run; your goal is to get one very large treasure.

The game is not set in the Zorkian universe, but the humor and level of fantasy will be familiar to fans of those games. Goblins, monsters with huge teeth, and armadillo-headed people are among the NPCs you will meet. The game has a bit of gallows humor, with quite a bit of comic violence to yourself and those around you.

This game also reminded me a bit of Augmented Fourth, a comedy fantasy about a bad court musician.

This game is recommended for fans of Zorkian worlds and of puzzlefests.