Adventures with Fido

I bounced off of this game during IFComp. It has white text on a light blue background, and occasionally has combinations even harder to read (like lime green on light blue). Also, it has most of its content locked behind actions that take multiple in-day actions without promise of reward.

But now, going through slowly after the comp, and especially using the walkthrough, this is a great game. Having a real-time pegasus race in the clouds, exploring haunted houses and underground worlds, there's a lot of fun to be had.

It's all disconnected and a bit weird, but that's some of the fun of IF. I just wish there was an option to change the background color.

In Adventures with Fido you play as a cute little corgi. It starts out quite simple, with you in your backyard. However, as you begin to explore the area, you discover that there's a whole lot more to this game than appears at first. There are hidden areas to unlock, achievements, multiple major quests, side quests, a race, various knowledge quizzes, and I'm sure a bunch of other things that I didn't uncover.

Your score is primarily measured in the number of bones you find.

So Adventures with Fido ends up being a kind of an exploratory RPG in text form. You're not killing monsters and earning experience points to unlock more powers, but things like achievements and quests certainly fall within the general RPG framework. The author has provided an excellent walkthrough (24 pages!) that serves as a guide to all of the game's secrets.

The game is cute, and the writing is amusing in places. I can see Adventures with Fido being a good RPG-lite game for kids who are old enough to read long passages of text but not quite old enough for, say, The Witcher 3. I'm afraid it only kept my attention for about half an hour, though, as some of the RPG aspects were a little too repetitive for my taste. (Well, one could argue that there's a lot about RPGs that is repetitive. Crafting comes to mind.)

The game does feature some unusual color choices that were hard on my eyes, such as white or green text on a light blue background.