Old Jim's Convenience Store

by Anssi Räisänen

Slice of life
2019

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Number of Reviews: 8
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1-8 of 8


2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A hatch? How quaint., January 7, 2023
by Rovarsson (Belgium)

Magnificent!
Terrible!
Fabulous!
Abysmal!

It's a real pity that there aren't any good superlatives to descrive something that is really good at being plain good.

Old Jim's Convenience Store (see, the plainness begins with the title already...) assumes nothing, seeks no higher glory, has no ambitions I could discern apart from providing an pleasant semi-adventurous hour or so. It does so by means of an easy but rewarding treasure hunt in an underground tunnel/cave.

You see? It's the exemplification of adventure tropes. It's a cliché boiled down, condensed to its purest essence. Except that it's set in a convenience store instead of a spooky manor.

I had a lot of fun playing through this. There is comfort in re-exploring well known ground. There is pleasure in seeing the familiar treated with loving craft.

I'll settle for "Brilliantly Average!"

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Classic Good Time, October 15, 2020

This was one of my favorites in the 2019 Xyzzy Awards, a fun surprise for classic parser fans like me. The world feels very old-school with its own twists, and the puzzles gave me enough variety without getting overly complex or difficult. I didn't find it terribly ambitious or deep, but it was a pleasant play and just the kind of fun I wanted from it.

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Simple, but enjoyable, August 8, 2020
by Jason Lautzenheiser (Navarre, Ohio)

I really like these style of games. I'm partial to the treasure hunt style of games. Give me some puzzles to solve, some treasure to find, and at least some sort of story bringing it all together and I'm perfectly happy. This game is just that. Took me about 20 minutes to finish and I only got slightly stuck once mostly because I had to guess the verb in a few places. Other than that, just a few minor grammatical issues were found.

Although there were a few cases where a few more verbs could have been used to ease some of the guessing, it still appears to be a pretty solidly coded game. One nice feature was it remembered solutions to puzzles when you had to perform them again, thus removing some of the monotony of going back and forth a few times (once my own fault when I failed to pick up a needed item early in the game.)

Overall a nice fun little adventure, just the kind that I enjoy.

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Short, timeless adventure, August 6, 2020
by verityvirtue (London)

A convenience store with a secret - standard fare I'm sure for those who grew up on adventure games. This game feels timeless, actually; what use is trappings of modern life if all around you is blank desert? Features a generic PC whose motives are generic and relationship with the titular uncle conveniently vague. Look, it's not a bad game. While short and predictable, it's complete and mechanically sound; please don't see my rating as meaning that the game is actively bad.

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Simple, but sweet, December 27, 2019
by Stian
Related reviews: IFComp 2019

Old Jim’s Convenience Store is somewhat simple and unoriginal, but rather sweet nonetheless. It is essentially a very short and easy parser puzzler, made slightly more difficult by having to guess a few verbs. It’s also quite unpolished, something that rather detracted significantly from my enjoyment of it. The writing is decent enough, but also nothing special. Still, it only takes about 15 minutes to play through it, and that much it was definitely worth.

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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Fine game but not particularly memorable, December 7, 2019
by deathbytroggles (Minneapolis, MN)

A potentially decent game for beginners as the story and settings are simple and charming and puzzles are straightforward. Unfortunately, the prose is isn’t as elegant as it could be and there’s a few missteps that break the storytelling. The first comes right at the beginning. To wit:

“...your car is to the south where a straight road with no traffic passes the store in an east-west direction…”

>x car
You can’t see any such thing.

Yes, it was simple enough to go south and then examine my car, but I started out annoyed and gave up on anything being too detailed.

The most glaring issue comes in the ending, when you read a letter from Old Jim, where it begins with “Hi there (your name).” Either this was a bizarre design choice or the author forgot to prompt the player to ever enter their name while playing.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Short but fun puzzlefest, November 20, 2019
by Denk
Related reviews: inform

This game is a short puzzlefest set in the present. You inherit a convienience store from your uncle. However, there is more to it than that. I don't want to spoil anything, so I will not say anything more about the plot. The puzzles are quite easy. I did however, have to consult the walkthrough once, which I regretted since the action I needed to do was an action I usually try if I am stuck, but forgot to try here. So the puzzles were certainly fair. The story is not original at all but serves the purpose for a good but fairly easy puzzlefest. Recommended, especially to people new to parser IF.

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
A small nugget of a puzzle game, October 2, 2019
by MathBrush
Related reviews: 15-30 minutes

This author has been writing for almost two decades now. His games are compact, with small settings allowing for experimentation.

This game is no exception. We have a very constrained situation at first, which opens up into a somewhat larger area. We're investigating our uncle's abandoned gas station which we have now inherited.

It took me a while to get the gist of the game. I missed the big twist because I tried (Spoiler - click to show)look under newspapers instead of (Spoiler - click to show)look under cardboard, but a peek at the walkthrough sent me on my way.

The writing is brief, reminiscent of Adventure and other mainframe games. The programming is mostly polished, my favorite feature being that the game remembers your past solutions to transversal puzzles and repeats them for you after you've done it once, like Hadean lands.

There's nothing bad here, I just wish it was more exciting and longer.

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