The Bony King of Nowhere

I played this game years ago but somehow never reviewed it.

Luke Jones wrote several games in the mid-2010's that had a unique style of humor to them. The games tended to be implemented in kind of a sparse way but to have lots of characters and lots of dialogue. A typical example of the 'Luke Jones' style is the opening of this game, with words like:

You see an apple, a log, and Your Dog here.

But there's also a pigeon that drops a letter at your feet then flies away saying 'F*** you!!'

The goal of this game is to deliver a letter to a king in a fantasy world, although the actual events end up changing over time.

There's a glulx port of this as well, which I haven't tried. Overall, Luke Jones games are just a brand of their own, like halfway between Robb Sherwinn and Zork. If you like one of these games, you'll like his others.

I very much enjoyed this game.

[I'll give BRIEF descriptions, to keep this as spoiler free as possible.]

The story is very well-crafted, and it's extremely funny. I laughed aloud at least every four to five turns.

The puzzles and riddles were spot-on as well. (Not too difficult, but not too easy.)

The NPCs (that means 'non-playable characters, for those of you who are new to the IF scene) are extremely enjoyable. (HINT: (Spoiler - click to show)Sometimes you need to 'ASK so-and-so ABOUT such-and-such', and sometimes you need to 'TALK TO so-and-so' -- depending on the situation and the NPC.)

Here's a question: do you enjoy a good pun? This game's packed full of them!

It has a satisfying ending as well.

Overall, I found it very enjoyable. (Did I say that already?)

If you miss the old-school parser adventures, then give this one a shot! I bet you'll be glad you did!

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One note regarding the version of the game available from textadventures.co.uk as of 4/28/17 5:30 pm, CST (which I believe to be the most recent version):


Do not read this until you've officially declared that you are stuck.
(Spoiler - click to show)

If you are stuck at any point, try examining things. Sometimes you need to examine one thing to discover another.

The Bony King of Nowhere is not a good game. It's clumsily written, with descriptions that somehow manage to be short and rambling at the same time. The tone shifts unstably between overwrought attempts at humour and heroic fantasy played straight.
The author unevenly shook a big bag of capital letters over the Objects in the game, so they are all capitalised. Except when they're not. A bunch of apostrophes mutinied and decided to pick all the wrong "itses" to go hang out.
The way the location descriptions are printed is wonky, with one half of the text on top, the automatic object listing in between and another few lines of description underneath.

It took stamina and dedication to power through instead of throwing it aside after the first few rooms.

And yet...

Underneath the clumsy wonky wobbly writing there is actually the scaffolding of a decent fantasy adventure quest.
The map is small and seemingly straightforward, but it has enough twists and turns to make it interesting. Similarly, the puzzles come across as simple, but most have a little hindrance or extra step that gives them the necessary satisfaction value.

And the inclusion of NPC Gerald the Heroic Mouse is a stroke of brilliance.

Oh, if only the author had sent this through a few more rounds of testing, and sat down at the writing desk a while longer...