Century

Intrigued by the earlier one star review, and at the risk of giving this more reviews than it deserves, I had a look at this myself. Sadly, it seems the previous rating is more or less right. Ostensibly a simple puzzle game, of the sort that seems to spontaneously germinate from Adventuron, it is hugely marred by unnecessarily hidden objects, impossible to guess commands and an enormous extravagance of bugs that, if you were an electronic sparrow, would keep you sated for days (perhaps forever). But as a player, it's a rather maddening experience. On the plus side, I enjoyed the typical Adventuron bloopy noises and retro graphics, and this first-time author has obviously tried to do something that hasn't quite worked, so it feels mean to chastise too much. Two stars for the effort that has gone in.

So, okay, I went to Garry Francis's walkthrough up at CASA/Solutionarchive.com pretty quickly for this one. Which is sad. The graphics are cheery and colorful. But it hits the "you have amnesia and are not sure what you're doing" a bit too heavily--and unintentionally, in the case of some verb-guessing.

Being stuck in the cave isn't so bad. This part is decently well-contained, though why and how the combination to a safe is scattered in parts about the area is a mystery. The puzzles are sensible. You find a key in the safe. You get out and climb a tree and even hunt for food! (This part is random and frustrating and chases people off. The next puzzles seem like arbitrary guesswork, unless i am missing something.)

You then find some treasure, except ... except ...

Well, the ending had me shaking my head a bit, too. I felt heckled. Not that that's a bad thing, and not that it was particularly abusive, but the shift from "what's going on here, anyway?" felt as helter-skelter as the game itself.

Given the chaos that transpired even with a walkthrough, I recommend you have one close by if you take the plunge with this game. There's a certain eagerness to it, to give you some standard adventure-game locations with weird twists, along with some puzzles that should feel good to solve. But they bounce from perhaps too obvious to "whoah, that was weird" too quickly.

However, if you're one of those people who can get into playing every game in a comp once you start, take solace in this game having enough heart that any frustration endured because of these puzzles is not lasting. That's how Adventuron rolls.

Century is a text/graphic adventure which reminds me of them ’80s: simple text, cosy graphics, sensible puzzles, not much of a story.
I enjoyed it.

A nice reminiscence of 1980's C64 cassette games. I'm now too old to wrestle a parser though.