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DELRON
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The Angel, the Devil and the Human Reviews
Author: Benjamin Samuel
Date: 2007
ADRIFT 4.0
Reviewed by MrPetrov
Mr. Jar took the time and made the effort to produce a
pleasant little game and send it out into the harsh and alkaline plains of the
ADRIFT world. I cannot say how many people have downloaded and played it but it
worries me that not one of them has taken the time to even say 'Thanks for
spending six or eight hours out of your life putting together a creative work
that few people understand and even fewer will really appreciate'. This is even
more worrying because of the long times between new games (at least on the site)
and the dearth of response even to old games. Thus not only did Brain in Jar
succeed in making a clever and playable game he also managed to pull it off on a
sort of creative cantilever. He deserves our applause.
TADAH is, as BIJ tells us, a rather old riddle wherein various reactive
components must be arranged or eliminated. Sort of like a mental version of
toothpick solitaire. Now Mr. Petrov (to use the third person) is not an
intellectual. Years of hazardous chemicals and stressful situations have caused
in him a wide departure from formal logic and his capacity for analysis was left
behind a long, long time ago. To Mr. Petrov a riddle is an enigma wrapped in
something really damn hard.
And so I (returning to the first person) did what any forthright and honest
person would do when faced with something that demands intellectual effort. I
Googled the answer. Sure enough, "Fox chicken corn puzzle -porn" (that's a
Boolean logic joke) delivered up to me the fact that…
Nope, sorry. You're just going to have to play it. Or at least copy-and-paste
into the search bar on your own.
The puzzle, irregardless of the Googling thing, is sufficiently well put
together to be engaging. I say sufficiently because it does not contain any of
the three elements of American popular writing (terrorists, breasts, explosions)
or mainline fantasy writing (elves, giant robots, breasts) and therefore most
people under the age of twenty-four will immediately lose interest. That is
their loss and our growing challenge.
BIJ wisely uses cut outs to avoid traditional IF commands (look, kill, conquer
world) that would spoil the operation of the puzzle. This is to his credit, as
my obsession with looking, poking, and/or setting on fire all of the visible
elements of any particular location would have delayed me from attempting to
solve the issue at hand. It's also the reason I was kicked out of school. All
the same I would rather have had some ogle-time with the succubus secretary or
maybe drop-kicked and imp or two. And you can only imagine the fun that could
have been had in Heaven.
The descriptions in the game are short and not overly complex but contain quite
a bit of cleverness and good humor. I was disappointed at some grammatical
errors, though, especially in the Heaven location. One solution for this seems
to be to write the major elements of a game (room descriptions, introductions,
and so forth) in a commercial word processor which will pick up on and underline
errors that might otherwise be missed. Once the work has been machine proofread
it is fairly easy to copy-and-paste into the very-big-text-box that Campbell has
provided for us. Of course, I am no one to complain over grammar. My ongoing
(and losing) battle with punctuation and indentation is well recorded in the
preceding fifteen hundred words. All the same, text errors throw the player out
of the game's milieu (French, meaning, "word made up by Lit professors who can't
write worth a damn themselves") and lessens the playability thereof.
Even with the limited amount of text provided there were some very good jokes.
BIJ's hell sounds better than his heaven (Sexy succubus secretary, people, how
can you lose?) and the end-game trick deserves a cleverness point or two. I also
liked the inclusion of a pre-game menu and instructions. TADAH is sufficiently
complex in concept that an instructions and an explanation is warranted and BIJ
was not found wanting. Tart good humor is good for IF text and really keeps the
player involved but only when it is matched by completeness and attention to
detail.
There also was, wisely, included a shameless plug for Campbell in the credits
section. BIJ clearly worked hard on his game and wanted to let the Big Guy know
how much he appreciated the anvil he used for hammering out the iron. If
Campbell deigns to descend from his golden throne on Skull Island and read this
poor little post I pray that he knows that we are all in debt to his mightiness,
majesty, manliness, meatiness, and other adjectives beginning with M. Yea, for
the guy, he is cool. Cool is he with his hat and his sunglasses and his good
taste in forum design. And there was much rejoicing for a new version was
released. Amen.
My only notable complaint about the game is that BIJ doesn't initially include
an obvious protocol for movement between the three layers of the Hell, Earth,
and Heaven. I suppose it should have been obvious that going up would take me
out of Hell and up onto earth but a good way to cover this would have been to
include alternate commands like "Go To X" or by including a route up and down in
the location description. The game's structure isn't hugely demanding on the
intellect of the player (unless you're Mr. Petrov) but these little streamlining
details can really make a difference in the long run.
I again applaud Brain in Jar for a good piece of work that is clever and
engaging while building upon a traditional logic puzzle which, thankfully, is
easily solved with a little search-bar help. I am looking forward to more and
longer works by this author and by other newcomers to the community.
Of five 'stars':
Writing: ***
Playability: ***
Cleverness/Originality: ***
Structure:***
Completeness/Error Checking: **
Overall): ***
Reviewed by David Whyld
Okay, I generally avoid 4 Kb games because a) they're 4 Kb and that’s way too
small for a proper game, b) they're 4 Kb and that’s way too small for a proper
game. But owing to the death/dearth of new ADRIFT games lately, and the fact
that someone writing a game ought to be encouraged, I decided to give it a go.
The game is a take on the fox/chicken/corn puzzle which I'm sure I heard about
at school but couldn’t really recall till I read the intro. Here you have to
apply the same kind of theory to a devil, an angel and a human: namely, getting
them from Hell to Heaven without anything untoward happening to any of them
along the way.
The game warns me at the start that if I leave the devil and the human together,
the human will sell his soul to the devil. It also advises me that if I leave
the devil and the angel together, the angel will smite the devil. I tried both
of these things* and nothing bad seemed to happen. The human didn’t sell his
soul to the devil (or if he did, he did so very quietly and didn’t let on) and
the angel didn’t smite the devil (at least, not that I noticed) and the game
progressed merrily on its way and concluded satisfactorily. As it’s a small
game, I played it through four times trying different combinations of who to
take first and who to leave behind, and the game concluded with the happy ending
each time. Is it possible to fail? Even when I was deliberately trying to make
it fail, I still succeeded.
* Present me with a big red button and a sign saying “DON’T PUSH THIS BUTTON OR
TERRIBLE THINGS WILL BEFALL YOU” and I’ll be tapping on the button before I've
even finished reading the sign. I'm like that.
A few technical points: TAKE works but the more common GET doesn’t. I can’t DROP
any of the characters once I've TAKEn them, but I can LEAVE them behind. They're
also not listed in my inventory despite the fact that I'm effectively carrying
them around. The angel, devil and human have each one conversation topic that
they repeat endlessly, irrespective of what you actually asked them about.
Examine is underused: you can examine the angel, devil and human, but everything
else just returns the same default message that there isn't much to look at in
this game. Sure, the game is about the puzzle of getting all three characters to
Heaven without anything bad happening, but it wouldn’t hurt to include a few
descriptions of other things as well.
But I didn’t mind the game overall. It was one of the few (and it really is a
few) small games I've played that was actually worth the download and that
didn’t get immediately deleted off my hard drive five minutes later with a
muttered “next time, write a proper game” comment. I don’t know if it’s possible
to lose the game (a bug?) or whether I was just incredibly lucky in always
managing to find a winning ending, but a quick glance in the Generator (always
nice when people don’t password protect their games) doesn’t immediately show me
a losing ending so I’m assuming the bug, if it is a bug and not just the writer
going easy on the player, is intentional.
Reviewed by Duncan Bowman
Little Game, Little to Offer
It's the chicken/corn/fox puzzle with a different theme. If you already know the
answer, there is nothing for you here. If you don't, you might have fun solving
the puzzle, but there's nothing especially deep going on here. Implementation is
the barest minimum. The game explores no themes and has no conflict beyond its
one, simple puzzle.
It's not *bad* per se, the author even says that he wrote it in the course of a
couple days, but the result is a small, hollow thing. For its solution, the game
offers a fanfare on the level of a kazoo toot. Meh.
By Po. Prune
Enjoyable
Quite a neat game, and although it takes a little thinking (but that is the
whole point, isn’t it?) not too hard to figure out.
I enjoyed playing it.
Reviews should be considered copyrighted by their respective authors.
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