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Luster

by Jared Smith

2011

(based on 12 ratings)
2 reviews

About the Story

In the outskirts of a deserted town, the adventurer carefully explores, looking for rare gems.


Game Details


Awards

37th Place - 17th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2011)


News

For the completionists out there, here's a walkthrough and map of Luster, a game from the 2011 IFComp that didn't quite offer a solution and had a few trappy bits. Since it seemed a lot of people got stuck, I decided to give it a go--and finally got it, on my not-first try!

The walkthrough contains some commentary on bugs but I hope it is not vicious. The intent is more maybe to show ways to look for your own bugs, or maybe figure how a game might've forgotten to implement things, whether testing or judging. I think we've all made the sorts of mistakes noted in the walkthrough if we've tried to write a game.

I haven't seen this sort of announcement much at IFDB, and I don't really have a website of my own to dump files like this on, so I hope this sort of announcement is kosher.

Map with trizbort http://trizbort.genstein.net/, game disassembly thanks to this thread: http://www.intfiction.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=12195

Happy gaming!
Reported by Andrew Schultz (updated on March 22, 2014) | History | Edit | Delete
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Member Reviews

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Number of Reviews: 2
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
A buggy but fun game with a walkthrough/map that are almost better than the game, April 20, 2016

This game was one of the last place entries in IFComp the year it came out. It's a traditional treasure romp where you gather 4 gems and then put them in a museum.

It's buggy quite a bit; examining a sign can switch the room you're in, there's no way to get a "You've won" message, and some items have names like pedestal3.

Someone went through several years later and decompiled the game and wrote a walkthrough and made a map. The map and walkthrough are fascinating, and provide an interesting insight into game design.

Recommended (with its walkthrough) for those who are interested in writing games.

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Needs Polishing To Truly Shine, January 19, 2012
by Jonathan Blask (Milwaukee, WI, USA)
Related reviews: IF Comp 2011

Despite its capitalized objects and oddities, there's enough good things going on here that part of me almost thinks that an established author is having a laugh at us- trying to make his or her own version of, say, a Phoenix-type treasure hunt. The few puzzles I solved really did have a nice sense of accomplishment to them. Also, there is an odd sort of narrative going on (the protagonist has a past that we find out more about throughout the game).

Those nice things are dampened by shoddy implementation and a woeful lack of synoyms (I personally got hung up on (Spoiler - click to show)a goblet, some dye, and some unintuitive liquid management). I probably won't be giving this game another chance until an updated version comes out, but if one did, I'd definitely play it.

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Luster on IFDB

Recommended Lists

Luster appears in the following Recommended Lists:

My (19) January CASA/solutionarchive walkthroughs/contributions by Andrew Schultz
This month I got back into contributing to CASA. Actually, I never seriously had before. I have a year's goal of getting to 150 points, or Dungeon Master. I tried to avoid duplicating David Welbourn's excellent work both by checking his...

Polls

The following polls include votes for Luster:

Kusoge of the IF Comp by Molly
From Hardcore Gaming 101: "Kusoge" (糞ゲー, or クソゲー) is a Japanese compound word - "kuso", meaning "garbage, crap, shit", and "ge", short for "geemu", the Japanese pronounciation of the word "game". It means, quite literally, "shit game"....




This is version 4 of this page, edited by Zape on 4 May 2021 at 10:12pm. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item - Delete This Page