Camelot Jack

I was playing three different versions of this game on and off and the first two at least were very buggy. I haven’t poked much at the most recent version (uploaded 7th May 2024 as of this review) so I don’t know if the bugs I noticed are still there or not – I just speedran through it after running into a gamebreaking bug near the end of the version prior.

The parser is very exacting and so I’m not sure how beginner-friendly it is. However, the game is coded from scratch in C# and I always find that pretty impressive! The author was also very reactive to feedback during the jam, which was really helpful.

A short game with a fun tone, so worth a go if you don’t mind persevering.

The trouble with parser games is that players can type in literally anything and hope to get a reasonable response out. This causes problems when the player enters something that seems logical to them which the game rejects.

There are two ways of addressing this: training players on a standardized set of verbs, so they enter a narrower range of commands, and programming more responses into your engine/game.

This game is a custom C# engine. Unfortunately, it doesn't recognize as wide a range of commands as most of the popular parser engines do, and it doesn't use common player-recognized commands and shortcuts like I and L, so it's missing both ways to keep player frustration at bay. I ended up frustrated a lot. I couldn't even read the initial text, as it scrolled off screen and mouse and arrow keys didn't move it (althought pg dn eventually did).

There are buttons and an extra text field, designed to make the task easier, which helped. But overall I think that the author vastly underestimated the ability of players (including me) to type exactly the wrong thing, over and over.

Combined with this, the game does not save or undo (and I had to manually exit to restart), and it has several instant deaths and other ways to lock yourself out of victory (I had to restart on two different occasions because I GAVE something TO someone, which the game accepted, but they didn't give it back).

The storyline is that you are in a dungeon cell where Excalibur has appeared, in the stone, and you have to escape. There are a few segments with fairies, but that's the end of this preview.

As a C# project made in a month this is very impressive, so much so that I would be impressed by this if I were on a hiring committee. As a parser game among many other parser games, it falls a bit flat. I don't know if the author reads IFDB reviews, but I'd suggest looking at some other current parser games to see what's possible in terms of responsiveness, and/or running more cycles of feedback with having people test the game and see what commands could be implemented to smooth gameplay.

The name Camelot Jack brings up, perhaps, President John F Kennedy for those of us who live in america. It's a good solid title without that, because we have an idea of what fairy tales get mashed up, namely Jack and the Beanstalk and Camelot with King Arthur. But unfortunately, the homebrew parser gets in the way of the author's ideas, and we're left with some minor laughs about how the author had trouble getting stuff done, and they try their best, really, but things never take off, even if the puzzles presented are a nice short jaunt to try and leave a prison. The author seems to have gotten the scope right, but CJ isn't really a good fit for the competition, as it feels more like "my first parser game as an author" than "let me help you play your first parser game."

The layout is impressive, with buttons to push for common parser commands. And having Swordy, your sword, help you along in the all-too-brief tutorial helps to not take things too seriously and forgive some rough bits. But it's also hard to do simple things like take inventory or even go north. While clear GUI is nice, though, CJ doesn't understand abbreviations like I for Inventory. NORTH gives "I know not this north of which you speak." So the humor does try a bit too hard.

Nevertheless, sitting down with a walkthrough and going through (going off course may make the game unwinnable,) provides a smile or two, and by the end, you see what the author was getting at, but it could probably have used more testing. You probably know what to do with cheese if you've been an adventure before, so that's good for beginners, and there's a neat little main puzzle where you have to choose between three trapped containers, and one item that didn't seem handy comes in handy, and it makes sense, and you feel clever outsmarting an NPC. This is something to build on. Once you win, you don't really win, but you get a message that the author had hoped to do more. They definitely can one day, as the GUI is impressive here and shows the author knows what he's doing, but the competition really isn't focused on that sort of convenience.