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1-10 of 10 - Krumbleton, April 10, 2024
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
An Enjoyable Soak In An Old School Tub, March 29, 2024The Only Possible Prom Dress was for my part a long-awaited sequel to Not Just An Ordinary Ballerina and showcases the author's admirable refusal to run with the modern interactive fiction herd. If you thought that long, puzzle-heavy parser games with subordinated plots were a thing of the past think again. While there's Jim Aikin there's hope for us old-timers.
I'd played Ballerina a decade ago and even then games of this type had of course become rarae aves. By the time of this sequel they had become as rare as right wing governments and pubs that take cash.
The diaphanous plot revolves around your efforts to buy your daughter Sam a dress for the senior prom as her kid brother has (deliberately or not) spilled ink on the designated apparel. A perfect excuse for another visit to the somewhat creepy and almost deserted Stufftown, Jim's ode to the excesses of consumerism. George Orwell once described advertising as "the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket" and the author obviously shares these sentiments; I was reminded of Cronenberg's Starliner Towers as I wandered around this futuristic dystopia. The whole scruffy, pigeon-violated edifice of Stufftown is crammed full of shops, twenty-nine of them to be precise, selling everything from surreal-shaped birdbaths to microscopes; they are nearly all deserted as a local lacrosse game has made the people of Stufftown forget about commercialism for a day at least. Rubbish is strewn in passageways, stairways are broken, maintenance equipment is rusty and forlorn. The NPCs you meet along the way and with whom you will have to interact to win are as decrepit as the building in which they work - Betsy the chain smoking girl from the beauty salon has fingernails bitten to the quick and has obviously just been dumped by her boyfriend; the corpulent clairvoyant spends her days knitting; the art gallery owner is chock full of existential angst and stares fixedly at the floor. The two owners of this corporate monstrosity sit in their glass-desked ivory tower on the top floor and dream of the future and virtual tours of their world where money is spent on cutting edge technology and not on disinfectant or hammer and nails.
Woven into this depressingly naturalistic milieu are a number of supernatural elements. These are used sparingly and thus with deftness. A homeless man sees pixies flying around his head; an annoying purple dinosaur follows you around and two experimental protagonists must be brought back to life to complete your mission by dint of recipe collecting. As you progress the difficulty level of the problems facing you increases and the story naturally progresses as problems are solved. It is not, however the kind of game where you are stuck on one problem and thus unable to progress; often solving one will help with a problem that you have put on the back burner.
You can choose to play the game with hints on or off and I chose the latter. The former feeds you clues on your mobile phone when you reach certain points in the narrative and FULL SCORE will show your progress out of two hundred and fifty and itemise the obstacles you have overcome, much like Curses.
The problems themselves constitute a mixture of traditional tropes. There are doors and portable items to be unlocked, anagrams and mathematical posers, hidden passages to be revealed, machines to be brought to working order or vandalised, stores to be broken into and other characters to be cajoled/bribed/unmasked. Favours are very much bought with favours.
There are seventy-four portable items and all have at least one use. There are no tiresome inventory limits or daemons and the game will automatically jettison items that you no longer need if you pass a certain central location in the game which is a thoughtful and none to easy to program feature. Some items have multiple uses. There are mazes in the game, however all are outside the drop items to map variety, a subtle nod towards IF modernism.
It is pretty difficult to put the game into an unwinnable position although two particular puzzles do present this opportunity. Save, save and save again. I found the parser to be more than adequate and it will try to auto correct and interpret your typing errors. I came across almost no typos and very few other bugs, although one involving a locked gate stands out. This is not game breaking however.
In summary this is a well coded, well written puzzle-based diversion; if you are endowed with patience and like old style games with modern IF conveniences you will enjoy this. Just prepare to put aside a lot of spare time and read location descriptions very carefully.
2 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
That's one long puzzle chain!, January 27, 2024About two years ago, I beta-tested the first half or so of this game. Things got busy, and I only just now got around to playing through the latter half.
In retrospect, I was quite impressed by the large array of puzzles through which one must muddle to finally reach their goal, many of which are charmingly creative in concept.
This is a great game which, for me, was taken down a slight notch by some mechanical issues. One bug was particularly grieving, where an object that I was finished with still stayed like a ghost in my inventory, and prevented my PC from implicitly taking things out of her inventory bag. (Happily I found a way to get rid of it. Also, I contacted the author with my transcripts and there is a good chance this may be fixed.) I also noted a few instances of what we might call guess-the-verb(-phrasing) problems, where attempts that clearly intended the same thing were met with default messages that could be misleading. Certain portions of under-implementation also, in my case, discouraged further investigation of what would turn out to be the important clue or solution.
But even though the negatives take more words to explain in a review, I don't for a moment suggest that you should pass this one by if you like a good old-school puzzle game. It's a good one, with a lot of potential for satisfying moments. You just might need to be okay with relying on some hints.
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
Just the ticket for those who yearn for the IF of yesteryear, January 7, 2023Adapted from a review on intfiction.org
As a TADS writer myself, I was happy and relieved to see another TADS game make it into IF Comp 2022. (There was only one in 2021, the atmospheric Ghosts Within.) On top of using the venerable authoring system, Aiken’s entry is also a sequel to his 1999 Inform-based Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina (which I’ve not played). Prom Dress is very much a throwback game, and the author’s notes indicates he meant it to be seen as such.
The premise is one of domestic plight: At the last minute, your seventeen year-old daughter needs a new prom outfit to replace the one damaged by her younger brother. As fate would have it, the shopping mall is all-but-closed due to a downtown parade. Dutifully you drive to the mall praying you will find something for your daughter to wear.
The premise is particular, but the setup is generically familiar to text adventure fans. The deserted shopping mall—a rat’s nest of passages and walkways—and it’s numerous locked storefronts reminds of any number of crawlers, whether they’re set in a dungeon, a haunted mansion, a space outpost, or a jungle island. The few shops remaining open are manned with the requisite NPC providing key information and hinting about their highly-specific unmet need. They’re sufficiently implemented, but none I encountered popped off the screen character-wise.
A few nice touches separate Prom Dress from standard maze-grinding fare. For one, guards on the bottom floor man a video surveillance system. This limits where you can explore without being caught. Another nicety is your daughter at home texting what her Ouija board is spelling out, giving you automatic in-game clues on where to focus your attention.
The map is enormous. Even after two hours of play, I was still finding new locations, and no, not all had been unlocked by solving earlier puzzles—I’d simply not explored every available exit from all rooms. More than once I felt utterly lost. (Fortunately, a link to a downloadable map was added to the game after the comp started. I highly recommend getting it, unless you’re the type of person who likes drawing maps while you play.). Fans of nonlinear adventure games will feast on this game.
One gripe: A number of paths are asymmetrical, that is, going east will take you to a location where you have go south to return to your previous location. The logic for this can be teased out from the descriptions (“East and around a corner, the mall continues…”), but these twists really mess with keyboard muscle memory when you’re hot to solve a puzzle.
While one might not expect much commentary from a game of wander-collect-unlock-repeat, the twisty-promenades-all-alike layout does paint a compelling picture of brutalist American commercial architecture and its rapid decay due to rentier maintenance practices. This mall is the same setting as Aiken’s earlier effort, and references back to it highlight years of neglect and a crumbling infrastructure. Although not described in-game, I could "see" the mall's scuffled flooring and battered kick-plates, and smell yesterday’s Cinnabon in the air. It’s Thomas Cole’s Desolation in suburban miniature.
The map’s enormity is only matched by the inventory to be collected. A discarded shopping bag rapidly goes from a convenience to a necessity. The game is configured to permit only so much be held in-hand, leading to lots of automatic inventory juggling by TADS. One extreme example:
> get belt
(first putting the old-fashioned army helmet in the shopping bag
then putting the flashlight in the shopping bag then putting the gold
coin in the shopping bag)
Norms-bending is the norm here. Gaining access to the closed storefronts—that is, breaking and entering—is a major part of the game. General tomfoolery is performed, all under the guise of securing a prom dress. At one point, in order to advance, (Spoiler - click to show)I found myself waving a fresh pack of Marlboros under the nose of an NPC desperate to kick the habit—that one made me question myself. This is on top of the usual kleptomaniac shoplifting so central to most interactive fiction. (Did I mention the shopping bag?)
In counterpoint is a general levity. This is not a game that takes itself too seriously. The rent-a-cop guards are enraptured by a Law & Order marathon; the military recruiting office’s posters are a touch too jingoistic. It’s not hacker humor a la fnord and the number 42, but a subversive, smirking skepticism that pokes its head up now and then.
Most of my criticisms regard polish. The expansive map means many location descriptions are little more than prose enumerating all exits. It also means a surplus of unimportant decoration objects, with most returning stock replies to actions. Combined, this creates an unfinished feel in places. A few disambiguation problems made me stumble (such as rooms with multiple indistinguishable doors, or a golf ball / golf balls situation). And while it’s obvious the author was having fun with the regrettable puns so ubiquitous to mall shop names, some were stretched thin. (Which might make for another puzzle, but I did have to wonder: Would anyone call their store “The Finest in Taste”? Perhaps in a different part of the country than where I’m from.)
My largest gripe, though, is a bit of a spoiler: (Spoiler - click to show)Once you’re in possession of the shopping mall’s skeleton key, you can enter any store’s front door without explicitly unlocking it. This led to numerous times I tried a location exit thinking it led to an unexplored area, and then being instantly nabbed by the security guards watching the security monitors downstairs. UNDO is available, but to "die" by simply traveling a direction was wearing.
My meager score when I broke away tells me I barely scratched the surface. My first two hours, I was almost drowning in options to pursue. It’s a highly nonlinear game. Puzzle difficulty gradually ramps up as you advance through the mall. The nostalgia of navigating the quasi-maze in solitude, and the micro-bursts of dopamine when solutions are discovered, is just the ticket for those who yearn for the IF of yesteryear. If you’re looking for thoughtful story arcs or expressive characters, this might not be your bag of oats—but that’s not what the game set out to achieve. What it does want to achieve—an expansive puzzle-fest set in a non-traditional location—it does quite well.
- E.K., December 7, 2022
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
Shopping is Hard, December 5, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
Aaaah, TADS. Like slipping my feet into a warm bath. This is the parser-based IF experience I look for. Amazing, goofy premise and quest, large map, many puzzles from lever-and-button to locked-door to coerce-NPCs to (probably) wildly inappropriate and satisfying uses of everyday objects. The narration is capable and fun, integrating game-facilitating pointers and sly humor in equal measure. It’s not perfect: one NPC seems to attach to you without much lubricating text; a few incidents of can’t-do-that would benefit from a variable list; dense place descriptions without subsequent shorter summaries and/or bolded direction cues.
But really, those feels nit-picky. Especially in the face of a tremendous effort to flesh out nearly every noun with flavor text that makes poking around rewarding in the best traditions of early IF. Even the relatively limited NPCs which won’t make you fear the singularity, they are imbued with enough personality to remind you of NPCs of days gone by. Yes, they are code constructs, but they are amusing and welcome ones.
And that map! A gloriously dense and elaborate multi-level map to explore. Daunting even. Many locations have 4 or more cardinal exits and maybe some ups and downs too. Navigating the map was a treat - most locations have personality too, unique and idiosyncratic: weaving flavor and nav puzzles all over the place.
And here’s where my unfortunate game experience intrudes. For the first hour I wandered around mapless. I was so caught up in the delightful spell the place descriptions were putting on me I darted from one shiny exit to another without much rhyme or reason. And boy did I get lost. Over and over again. It was fun doing it! But eventually I realized I was never getting the dress this way. So I saved my game at one hour, determined to pick up next day with graph paper in hand.
Next day I went to restore my save… and couldn’t. It turned out to be an artifact of my own inexperience, exacerbated by some unfortunate HELP text (subsequently clarified to prevent others following my misguided path). It ended up being a happy accident though, as my flailing for solution showed me that there were maps (and walkthrough) available! Armed with those maps, I decided efficiency would make up the difference.
At the second one-hour mark I had fully recon’d the mall (locked doors notwithstanding) and a bit of its grounds, but only really ‘solved’ two puzzles. Plenty more were tantalizingly laid out before me. The narrative tone is friendly and fun, details plentiful and unique, and puzzles littering the joint. I found myself typing faster and faster as I noticed the clock running out, trying to eke out just one more location, conversation or search. If that's not the textbook definition of Engaged, I don't know what is!
This thing hums with love for the traditional IF form, and is a wonderfully capable pastiche in the best possible sense of that word. It stands fully on its own with wit and verve, and echoes all the best traditions of IF.
Played: 10/6/22
Playtime: 2hrs, incomplete
Artistic/Technical rankings: Engaging/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? Of course. Calls to me like a Siren from the 80's.
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
- jaclynhyde, November 22, 2022
- OverThinking, November 16, 2022
- rmartins, October 9, 2022
5 of
5 people found the following review helpful:
A complex and rich puzzle game in a mall with very large map, October 8, 2022This game is a sequel to Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina, a game a couple decades old. When I first played IF in 2010, I downloaded the Frotz app and played all the main games that come with it. After I found how fun big puzzle games like Curses! are, I searched for other games that were like it and found Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina. I ended up really enjoying the game a lot.
This sequel so far lives up to the original. Per IFComp rules, I've only played 2 hours, getting 20 out of 250 points and unlocking much of the map.
You play as a parent (I think a mother?) that is trying to get a prom dress for your daughter. There is a large mall that is mostly abandoned due to a parade. It's a 3-story mall, with many stores per floor and other areas outside.
It's a puzzle-based game, with a variety of puzzles, including conversation, codes, machines, animals, etc.
Like the original game, it has a huge map and is (eventually) very nonlinear. Unlike the original, it contains extensive in-game help systems and suggestions that smooth out the player experience. In particular, the (very mild early spoiler) (Spoiler - click to show)texts from your daughter help point you to the next available puzzle. I turned to the hints once, when I felt like I had a reasonable solution to something but it just wasn't working; it turned out I had just thought of it differently than the author, and the progressive hints gave me just the hint I needed.
The first two hours have been fun, and I look forward to the rest. I was just going to power through with the walkthru, but I think this is fun enough I'd like to take it slow later.
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