Realm of Obsidian

Another Mr. Lizard
IF: Realm of Obsidian
Members of what you or I might think of as the IF hardcore can somtimes seem to get a little snotty about them, but it’s true that you never know what you’re going to get with an IF game that comes as a Windows executable. Will the parser be almost, but not quite, fit for purpose? Will there be garish and ill-matched icons everywhere, including right over the bit of text you’re trying to read? Will you catch a virus from it? Will your computer? To play such a game is step heedlessly into the unknown, which is why Realm Of Obsidian found itself right on top of my non-randomised Spring Thing play queue. The opening warning that the game “contains scenes of horror, violence and gore” was only the icing on the tasty-looking obsidian cake. And like Steppenwolf, it’s “not for everyone”. Needless to say, neither is this review.
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Self as Fractal
Spring Thing 2009 Reviews: Realm of Obsidian - Amy Kerns
This is old school. It's a separate executable file. It has a nonstandard parser - the game's built with TAB (ThinBASIC Adventure Builder) by Philip Richmond. The text is in Fixedsys. All of these things are red flags, traditionally, in the comp (well, maybe not the Fixedsys.)

Yet I kind of liked this. It's surprisingly well-implemented - not just for a nonstandard parser, but for a comp entry in general. I only found one major bug, and it's for something you really shouldn't be doing. Just to illustrate, one of the classic implementation tests is whether >FLUSH TOILET works. Not only does it work, but it comes complete with sound effect! Which reminds me...
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Pissy Little Sausages
Spring Thing ‘09 – Amy Kerns’ Realm of Obsidian!
Okay, premise is that Nick had to move back in with his dad, who is acting strangely. Somehow this makes him different from everybody else’s dad in the whole world.

Got a laugh from the Painful Death track listing, particularly Bendy-Straw Enema. Call me crass, but that’s funny.

"You emerge into the hall. To your surprise, you see what looks to be a shimmering blue force field to the west! It looks like this will be an interesting day."

Time to change my anticipation of what sort of game this is! Also, this will not be of interest to anyone but me, but whatever it’s running on supports copy-paste. I love that.
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The Gaming Philosopher
[Spring Thing] Realm of Obsidian
Realm of Obsidian is a weird mix of the outdated and the newfangled. It is apparently made using a new IF authoring system that is not finished, but already works pretty well. (Although, for instance, "blue" was not recognised as referring to the "blue token", which could either be a fault of the game author or of the development system.) It also comes with sound and music, which is interesting, although I quickly turned off the music because it was not to my liking. I also turned off the sound, because the game was not willing to share my sound card with other programs, and I did want the play some of my own music--but this unwillingness to share the sound card might well have been a result of me running it in Wine.
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SPAG
Realm of Obsidian
I really ought to hate this game. After all, it's an expansive old-school dungeon crawl featuring a large, mostly empty map, combat, heaps of learning by death, and the sort of campy B-movie horror atmosphere that hasn't exactly been scarce in IF in this Age of Irony. Somehow, though, this game manages to be more than the sum of its parts. It's not what I'd call a good game, mind you, but I can't quite bring myself to hate it either. It just has a certain charm about it.

So, then... Realm of Obsidian is "the story of a guy named Nick" whose father has been indulging in some dreaded Satanic Rituals, and has managed to get himself carried off to the infernal realms. There's thus nothing for it but for Nick -- meaning you -- to follow in dear old dad's footsteps and kick some infernal dweller ass. Here we can begin to see what raises this game a cut above most in its genre: we may be stuck in an old school dungeon crawl, but at least we have a name and a personality. The Painful Death cassette we find on the floor of our bedroom -- games like this always start in our bedroom; that's simply sacrosanct -- that features song titles such as "Spinal Munch" and "Bayonet Douche" is worthy of a chuckle. Heck, just the fact that old Nick is still listening to cassettes in 2009 I find oddly charming and hilarious.
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