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Ba'Roo! Reviews
Author: Eric Anderson (Hensman Int'l)
Date: 2010
ADRIFT 4.0
Reviewed by TDS
This game suffers from serious guess-the-verb. The game mechanics are also a bit
problematic. In some games, you can easily get locked out of a good ending. This
is the case in this game. The problem, however, is that sometimes you are locked
out and the game immediately ends, while other times you are left thinking that
you could succeed…only to realize that you cannot. If you are going to allow the
possibility of a player getting locked out of the game, at least be consistent
(either end the game there or not, please).
The puzzles, though very interesting, are poorly implemented. This is mostly due
to the overwhelming presence of guess-the-verb. For example, you might have to
type, say, ‘kill john with knife’ instead of ‘kill john’ or ‘stab john’ even if
a knife is your only weapon. In other parts, you get to play guess-the-noun.
There are clear cases of a room description telling me ‘X is here,’ but when I
examine X, I get the response ‘You see no such thing.’ That is maddening. In
addition, disambiguation problems increase one’s frustration.
Like the puzzles, the storyline is also interesting but ill-implemented. The
problem is pacing; the author must ensure that the player doesn’t receive
information at the wrong time. I stumbled upon a text dump which was probably
intended to be seen after some preliminary dumps. I could not understand what
was going on because it was like I had walked in during the second half of a
movie. In text adventures, the author has to make sure the player doesn’t get to
the second half before trudging through the first (unless unconventional
temporal order is intended).
I couldn’t finish this game. The difficulty did not bother me. The story was not
unbearable. I’m afraid it was poor game mechanics that did me in. One puzzle
requires the use of an item that is never mentioned, alluded to, or examined.
I’m sorry, but this just will not do.
Reviewed by Lumin
I'm not sure if Ba'Roo! is Hensman's first game, or first full length game, or
what, but either way it's a lot of fun, and doubly impressive if the above is
true. There is a very old school vibe about it right from the start, and over
the course of the adventure you will get to explore an expansive cave system,
assemble a macguffin, say WTF at the plot a few times if you think about it too
hard, and shoot an anachronism in the face. (...to be honest I'm not sure if
that last one's necessarily an integral part of the whole 80's thing but it was
still a defining moment for me.)
Not to say that there weren't a few issues though, even if I did enjoy the game
as a whole. I encountered a fairly major bug and an annoying decision by the
author in the first room (being a jerk to the player may be a staple of retro IF
but my love for that particular aspect of the genre only goes so far), and later
had some GTV problems, as well as a poorly-clued puzzle that completely derailed
me for awhile. (At one point you're told to find a suit, but not given any
information whatsoever about where or how, and the otherwise fairly talkative
NPC has nothing to say on the matter. After a fruitless search I finally became
convinced I needed a key to access a certain area first, but that turned out to
be misleading as well...)
I wouldn't consider any of those complaints to be actually game-breaking
however, because in the end I still enjoyed the experience and was able to play
through without assistance (though apparently I missed a few things, for
instance the meaning of the title..), though after talking to a couple of other
players it may be that I lucked out and had a smoother ride through than
average. It turns out Ba'Roo! actually contains multiple paths (REAL multiple
paths, not just multiple endings where you type undo a couple of times to see
them all), which I thought was pretty ambitious. Whether the author got TOO
ambitious at the expense of solid gameplay I can't say until I get a chance to
personally check out the other paths, I think it's impressive in its own right
that he made the attempt, and hopefully any bugs can be cleaned up in a
post-comp release.
Reviews should be considered copyrighted by their respective authors.
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