Oz, The Great And Terrible

Oz the Great and Terrible (OGT) is a nice cute bitsy game if you don't read the text, and it's a funny subversive one if you do. The plot loosely follows The Wizard of Oz. You drop from the sky and find the Wicked Witch of the West buried under a house. As in the book and movie. The munchkins are oppressed, too, by the Wizard of Oz. Your goal is to find your dog Toto whom you lost.

I counted ten rooms on the main path, with ten off to the side. This didn't include the informational start and end rooms. So it's a pretty good size, with no risk of losing your way. Your friend the Scarecrow, Lion and Tin Man make an appearance, too, but it's in different circumstances, and it's not quite the companion story of the book. You need to do something for each of them before you can pass by. Once you do, the wizard beyond the emerald gates will give you your dog back.

Along the way are munchkins. A lot of munchkins. They relate to you what the wizard is doing, or what sort of animals are attacking them. There's almost a weird truce and balance between the wizards damage and the animals. And there are funny terrible scenes where you see a munchkin lying on its side in a field, and you find out why, or there is a small camping area where they are scared to make a fire. There's a cemetery, too, near the start. I almost missed it, but I'm glad I didn't when I tracked back to make sure I wasn't misssing something. Some of the scary bits are laid out clearly, but some imply certain things, and coming to that realization hits effectively. There's a bit of humor, too, especially when you try to take more brains than you need to in one place.

The graphics are a bit different than the usual bitsy game, which usually have wide open areas for when you can move to the next screen. Here, you're following the yellow brick road, as in the book, so you learn to follow paths and not open areas. The start is purplish, and the ending is green. (The empty spaces are black, naturally. Desolation and all that.) The color shifts help compartmentalize things into beginning, middle, and end. OGT also uses flashing rainbow text for dialogue, which was probably intended to be small neat cute harmless fun, but it adds a bit of spookiness here.

I'm generally a bit leery of remakes of classic literature, as I'm worried the author may just be relying too much on the original thing. Here, it's a really clever and fun take. I got a bit confused as to what to do in the end, as I think I needed to take the brains twice at the beginning and maybe visit all the rooms, so that was a bit confusing. But I would gladly play it again to figure out the details. It's funny and attractively presented.