Adventurer's Consumer Guide

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.