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Cursed Reviews
Author: Nick Rogers
Date: 2011
ADRIFT 4.0
Reviewed by George Dorn
The medieval city of Rylane is experiencing a crisis that
threatens to destroy life as currently enjoyed by its residents. The local
population of barrels and crates has skyrocketed, and with it the population of
their natural predators, the horse-drawn cart and driver.
This is the backdrop against which you have been framed and found guilty of
murdering your best friend and sentenced to a nasty, brutal and short life as an
animal of your choosing (so long as your choice is a fox, a rat or a snake.) For
my >2 hour session, I went with snake. This is an epically long entry for a comp
game; I barely made it through part one of three (or 6 if you count the
interludes and epilogue). I'm guessing the full play through could take 18
hours.
And what frustrating hours those would be. Physics, map and timing puzzles are
hard to get right. They require exceptionally good descriptions so the player is
immersed in the environment and can intuitively understand why things behave the
way they do. They require ample cues to the variety of actions the player can
take in a scene. Instead, descriptions are relatively sparse and cues are buried
deep in item descriptions and may not even pertain to a solution you can do as
your chosen animal. For example:
>X WAGON
The wagon is covered and currently unhitched, although it seems to be loaded.
One corner of the wagon cover has not been secured, though, and some boxes can
be seen.
>X BOXES
The boxes are made from wood and stacked in the corner of the covered wagon,
although they are currently exposed due to the wagon cover not being secured
over them. You can see some writing on one of the boxes.
A harsh, cold wind whistles by.
>X WRITING
The writing says: "Destination: Cayl Mason, Drekas, Sylaph"
But it turns out I don't actually want to get to Sylaph, so that's a red
herring. Also, along the way I accidentally tried >X BOKES, and more time
passed. This is a common ADRIFT problem, but a pet peeve of mine - time passes
for invalid actions or typos. In this game, that can be immediately lethal (bad,
but there's always >UNDO) or lethal a few turns from now (much worse).
I'm not someone who immediately goes to hints for help. I want to experience Ifs
without aid and judge them on their merit alone. But in addition to several
"guess the verb" puzzles, there are also quite a few "guess the puzzle" puzzles,
in which is not even clear what puzzle needs solving to proceed. Compounding
this was a handful of CYOA-like nonsequitur puzzles, where taking one action
leads to success where another leads to failure, but with no cues at all to
determine which is which. I don't think this is actually playable without hints,
which is why the author also provided a secondary IF build with a custom hint
system. But I'm not judging the hint system, I'm judging the IF.
All of this is not to say that this isn't a (potentially) good IF. This is an IF
with a great deal of potential. The plot and environment are interesting and
deep. The narrative structure (swapping the player into scenes and bodies) was
skillful. Even inventing a custom hint system (to replace ADRIFT's fairly
inflexible system) took effort. But the end result was hampered by insufficient
hands-off beta testing and ADRIFT engine itself.
Rating: 6. Solid (if long) effort, brought down by the verb hunting, huh?
puzzles, learning by dying, and some ADRIFT-based player abuse.
Reviewed by Emily Short
Cursed is an epic fantasy story. It’s substantial, on
the longer side of comp games, with several possible paths through the
narrative.
The opening of Cursed left me apprehensive on two fronts: first, that this game
really wanted to be static fiction, and second, that it was going to be a real
chore to follow.
The game opens with a long linear section in which the player can’t really do
much except wait, move along a preset path, and examine objects (to no
particular effect), while the game supplies backstory snippets and descriptions
of other people’s actions. Repeatedly the response to the player’s action is a
couple of lines, but is followed by a full page or more describing what else
happens during the same turn. Names, motives, and family connections come thick
and fast.
Moreover, the text that shows up is, shall we say, highly-strung:
And yet it still feels like such a waste. My closest friend is dead – murdered.
I still shudder when I remember finding his lifeless body and trying uselessly
to will him back to life. And then, as luck or fate would have it, all fingers
of blame pointed at me. I fought hard against the charges but to no avail. The
evidence was just too persuasive, the motives too clear, at least to everyone
else. It must have been, could only have been, me.
This is technically competent prose without being good narrative craftsmanship.
It flows smoothly, it’s comprehensible, it conveys emotions and a situation. But
it has the slickness of cliché (“lifeless body”, “finger(s) of blame”, “such a
waste”), and it tells rather than showing. As viewpoint writing, it falls down
because it feels as though the speaker is simultaneously highly emotional about
and distant from the events he’s describing. How does this viewpoint character
differ from anyone else who might have had a friend murdered? What makes him
unique?
The world-building also struck me as implausible. Here we have a pseudo-medieval
court with a king and wizards, but it’s apparently got laws and court procedure,
including detailed laws about sentencing precedent of a kind that didn’t show up
until the 19th century or later.
As for the characters: we’ve got a bunch of lords who look like they want to
take the kingdom apart — one of whom secretly killed the heir to the throne,
apparently — but the king responds to a difficult situation with a politically
naive outburst that makes him look vulnerable and powerless. Might he have felt
those things? Perhaps. But I think he would have found a way to take action
without sharing his feelings on the matter with the whole court. I doubt very
much that the sort of king who behaves this way would have maintained control
over a powerful group of ambitious contenders for very long.
Once we’re out of the prologue, the nature of the game changes substantially.
Now it’s a puzzler, but one full of sudden death and tight timing. That kind of
design can work, but Cursed makes it hard. Actions such as LOOK and LISTEN,
which are absolutely critical for detecting enemies and planning actions,
consume a turn; it would be easier to plan and navigate these sequences if they
didn’t take any time in this portion of the game. (Whereas they pretty much have
to take time during the cut-scene-heavy prologue.)
Then, too, room descriptions run on the long side, making it harder to pick out
rapidly which items are likely to be interactive and requiring a lot of
investigation. Because some of the intended actions require a number of LOOKs
and EXAMINEs to work out, it can require repeated dying thanks to time limits
before you’ve figured out the solution to the puzzle, which you then have to
execute as efficiently as possible.
So I died, and died, and died again, and finally went to the walkthrough, where
I found a sequence of instructions that ran fairly counter to my intuition about
what a creature like me could possibly do.
The author clearly put a huge amount of effort into this game, and it’s
ambitious: it’s going for diverse puzzle options (it looks like there are three
completely different midgames, effectively) combined with a complex plot and a
rich backstory. The idea that you can choose senses and skills during the
midgame is indeed cool.
To have the full intended impact, though, I think it would need non-trivial
revision:
– streamlining the opening so that it uses less text and doesn’t constrain the
player for so many turns in a row; tightening the characterizations; and giving
the player any agency at all (needn’t be a huge amount, but any would be better
than this long linear sequence where nothing you do matters much); then
– revising the body sections to be more fluidly playable, perhaps drawing on
examples like Gun Mute, Attack of the Yeti Robot Zombies, and conceivably
(though it’s commercial) Shadow in the Cathedral for ways to describe and clue
action set-pieces so that they move fast and pose some kind of puzzle challenge
but remain accessible to the player. (This is actually one of the harder things
to do well in IF, in my opinion, but it’s not completely impossible.)
Reviewed by Matt Wigdahl
OK, so in IF we now have both Curses!, the seminal
Inform work by Graham Nelson, and also Cursed, an ADRIFT game by Australian
newcomer Nick Rogers. Based on my cursory web search, the only IF work Nick has
publicly released previously was an ADRIFT conversion of the classic Adventure,
so welcome to the IF world, Nick!
CREDITS is implemented and shows numerous beta testers, which is a good sign.
The game also has apparently been tested under both the standard ADRIFT Runner
and SCARE, which is what I’m using. That’s a pretty good early indicator that
this isn’t going to be a half-baked effort. The intro text is good in that it’s
immediately trying to establish a character, less good in that it’s a bit
overwrought for what a person condemned to die in an hour or so would likely be
thinking.
Spoilers (some pretty major ones at the end) follow…
This is an ambitious work. Although on the surface it’s a desperate quest for
justice, it’s really about relationships — family relationships, to be exact —
with a strong current of “sins of the father” running through it all and a
slight undertow of somewhat genericized religiosity. It feels somewhat inspired
by George R. R. Martin’s “Game of Thrones” series, but that may just be because
of the medieval fantasy epic genre of the story. Or maybe because of the
frequent violent deaths.
You’re Torrin, the ward of King Rithusar of Rylane (get used to the “alphabet
soup” fantasy names — there are plenty), and you’ve apparently been framed for
the murder of the king’s son, Prince Alsanter. After being escorted to a quick
trial and conviction, you’re to be executed, until Rithusar, who still sees you
as a son and secretly doesn’t believe you’re guilty, convinces the court to
allow the wizard Rixomas to curse you into the form of an animal instead. Once
you leave the throne room, every hand is raised against you, and you have only
the whispered advice of Rixomas to guide you in an attempt to get help and
discover the true murderer.
You get to choose the animal you’re transformed into, which is a nice touch. The
form you choose apparently has a major impact on the puzzles you face, which is
another nice feature. I’m not sure how effective it is as a selling point for
IFComp, though, since this is a long game as it is and the two-hour limit will
likely be up before there’s significant time for replay. I chose the snake,
after asking my son what he would pick in this situation.
Your task as a snake is to get to the city of Kathrentia and speak with a wizard
there who may be able to help you. To get there, you’ll have to avoid hostile
humans and animals, and figure out inventive ways to manipulate your environment
to accomplish tasks that you can’t perform in your animal shape. As a snake, I
was pretty much limited to pushing things around with my nose, crushing, biting,
and hissing, but careful examination of the surroundings and creative use of
these limited actions had me catapulting through the air, plopping into
carriages from second-story windows, and getting blasted into the air on a burst
of water. For the most part, the physical puzzles were fair, fun,
reasonably-clued, and tolerant of varied attempts to solve them.
The same cannot be said of the conversations. In particular, a conversation with
the wizard Mazrena (or whomever you meet up with as a rat or fox) was so finicky
that I actually had to restart the game to get it to complete in an acceptable
way (a way that didn’t end up with me immediately getting chomped by a
mongoose). Similarly, some state seemed to get messed up during the final
conflict scene, requiring me to back to an old save and try again before the
game would complete as advertised. Although the author warns about frequent
death, this type of totally arbitrary, unclued death is pretty demoralizing.
Mechanically the game is reasonably sound. Occasionally the game would pretend
it didn’t understand a verb that it understood perfectly well in another
context, which I think is a pretty annoying and misleading problem. Every once
in a while it would output something that looked like a debugging state check ([locationhide-Dead=fox]),
there were some difficulties with disambiguation that were flagged as a SCARE
side effect, and I wished for more verb synonyms at a few points, but overall
these are fairly minor issues.
My love-hate relationship with the internal monologue continued throughout the
game. I like the idea of it, for the most part, but it seems pretty detached —
there’s a whole lot of telling, rather than showing, going on. Much of the time
these monologues jarred me out of immersion rather than deepening it.
There’s a lot of waiting in the game. Very often you just have to wait out as a
cut-scene plays through, perhaps walking as directed or moving to get it to
proceed. The author has quite a bit of backstory to push, and this is one way to
make sure you get it, but some of the scenes go on for longer than they should.
One thing I think the author does well is to jump into the persona of different
characters for interludes as the story progresses. To my mind, these
conversational set-pieces are a much better way of dumping backstory than
wait-driven cut scenes, so I was happy to see them used here.
The story loses a bit of force for me simply because the twist at the end is so
predictable — I had it pegged before getting out of the courtyard. And despite
the large amount of backstory, and the emphasis on the relationships between the
King, his two children, and his ward, I never felt the player was given enough
information to really understand why things played out as they did. I hope I
didn’t miss something as I came down to the wire on time, but I don’t think I
did.
It’s tough to rate the first game of the Comp. I like that this was an
ambitious, large, earnest game, with clever mechanics and a theme beyond that of
a simple fantasy quest. The fun puzzles and copious backstory make me want to
rate it pretty highly. It did a good job of leading you to use nonstandard
commands in interesting ways. On the other hand, it’s capricious and downright
frustrating at some points, the story somehow doesn’t fully satisfy, and there
are enough rough edges that I can’t give it a super high score. I’m going to
call it a 7 and reserve the right to adjust as I go. Nick, this was a good debut
for you. I’ll be watching for your future works!
Reviewed by TempestDash
Cursed is an incredibly well written and surprisingly
expansive game that unfortunately cannot remotely be completed within the two
hour time limit afforded IFComp judges. Since I probably will not be officially
judging any pieces, since I doubt I’ll get through the whole list before the end
of the comp, I kept playing through to see the ending and was rewarded with a
very cohesive story with a lot of intrigue and surprises. Unfortunately, as a
game, I found it to require more than a few leaps of logic that I was not
accustomed to.
The game has an interesting mechanic behind it, where you are given a choice in
the early prologue of the game and depending on that choice about 25-40% of the
game can be completely different. Even the character who eventually arms you
with the knowledge and powers to defeat the true villain of the story is
different, which surprised me when I took a gander at the other walkthroughs. As
of this writing, I’ve only gotten my way through the ‘Fox’ play through, but I
have an idea of how the Snake and Rat games play.
As I mentioned above, the writing is incredible in this game: imaginative,
grammatically correct, and evocative of living in a medieval fantasy world of
intrigue and magic. There were more than a few times I recalled Choice of Games’
‘Choice of Romance’ because of the various factions an political machinations.
The characters in this game all have fairly weird names, which I had difficulty
remembering without notes, and frequently mistyped, but this could easily
because of the rush I was in to experience as much of the game as possible
within two hours.
While I’m not a very experienced IF game player, I did run into a heck of a lot
of problems that required me to consult the walkthrough. I’m not sure what is
considered the culturally appropriate amount of hunting and poking around in IF
games these days, but I often felt that while my overall objective was clear in
any given situation, the immediate problem before me was fuzzy. Solutions are
not well hinted within the game, I found, often leaving the player to figure out
what the author was thinking. While the solution always makes sense, I rarely
found myself coming to that conclusion on my own, and frequently consulted the
walkthrough.
Part of this, I believe, has to do with the gimmick of being a non-human
character for most of the game. Descriptions, I found, don’t appropriate
designate what is reachable or intractable when you are a fox and you have to
try to mess with every single noun in the room descriptions to determine if it’s
too tall to reach or too smooth to climb or too heavy to move. There were
several times I made things happen and wasn’t clear on how those things helped
me.
Ultimately, this is a game where a great story is being told but the amount of
player agency is startlingly lacking. I believe there was only one path and that
path was often mired in confusing clues. Using my normal rating scheme, I’d have
to side with Not Recommended, because it’s impossible to get through without a
walkthrough and within the 2-hour time limit, but that’s unfair, because the
writing in this game deserves to be read. Perhaps I’ll go with: Recommended with
a Walkthrough Only, and leave it at that.
Reviewed by Ron Newcomb
Cursed is a game I really want to like. After
(partially) reading someone else’s review mentioning the longer passages of
text, I knew I immediately had to try it. I like to read, ya know, but much IF
asks me to type in about as much as I’m getting back. That’s a state of affairs
that has always seemed a bit wonky to me. An occasional forum quip is that
there’s more IF authors than players, and that it’s more fun to write an IF than
to play one. While I don’t believe that’s true, I do think there’s a reason for
the perception, and I think the status quo on quantity has something to do with
it.
Anyway, judo chop:
I settled in with Cursed happily reading about a crime I didn’t commit, and that
I’ll soon be executed, and that I probably can’t teleport out of this one like
in that Jon Ingold game. It did bother me that the writing wasn’t very strong. I
mean, it flowed well, it was readable, it was generally inoffensive. But the
king didn’t sound like a king, there wasn’t a lot of world-building or character
development going on considering the amount of words I was zipping through, and,
well, it just didn’t seem to be dense enough. There were some names and
relationships introduced, though, so it wasn’t bad enough to make me quit, but I
remember wanting to get to juicier parts of the prose.
What I did have difficulty with was the latter-day maze that marks the first bit
of serious physical interaction. Today’s mazes have a sensible geographical
layout in relatively normal locations, but the moving walls of death patrolling
the area make it become a maze. Moreover, these weren’t particularly believeable
walls of death, either. Foxhunts do not involve swords for a reason other than
the trees getting in the way, I’m just sayin’.
One part of the writing I did enjoy was how it switched to first person within
the italics. I’m one of those people who don’t generally like first-person
stories (IF or otherwise) but do like interiority, so the format of Cursed
worked really well for me.
The game gets harder further along, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep up if
the early sections gave me trouble, especially if others have problems with it.
I came for a story, but Cursed is a work that tries to cater to two different
audiences simultaneously — the reader and the puzzle-solver — and ended up
pleasing neither.
I give it a 7 of 10. I appreciate what it’s trying to do and enjoyed what time I
spent with it, but only because I bailed before it got seriously hard.
Reviewed by Yoon Ha Lee
In: 6:00 p.m.
An Adrift game, but Spatterlight will actually run this one. Yay!
And then I hit the intro text.
I can still remember the fear and desperation that surged through me at the time
of my arrest. It was like falling into a void that went on forever; tumbling,
clutching, gasping, my mind verging on the edge of insanity. To have followed so
soon after experiencing such painful loss seems unjust. I suppose justice always
sounds good in theory, yet is tragically denied to those that need it most.
I’m sure Alsanter thought something similar when my dagger was plunged into his
back by an unknown assassin. His life ended two months ago – mine has only
minutes remaining. Today is the day my judgement is decided by the court of the
King of Rylane. Today is the day I will die.
I see a lot of games fall down in failing to provide a good hook. I get that I'm
supposed to care about this high-stakes situation, and that I've been assured
that the player is in fact not guilty (unless there's something wacky going on
like hypnotism or fake fantasy versions of dissociative identity disorder), and
yet I just can't seem to care.
What doesn't help is the first paragraph (which is, of course, the first thing I
see). For one, it's overwritten. "[T]umbling, clutching, gasping, my mind
verging on the edge of insanity," really? And yet the description, for all its
wordiness, doesn't manage to convey anything but fairly high-level abstracts
(fear, desperation). There is little specificity. Triggered by the use of
"arrest," my first guess was that we were talking about a modern-day person
being arrested by a cop. I personally find it useful to get some sort of
specific cue as to the setting/situation so I can start getting into the
character's head.
Anyway, I have some vague memory of playing games that managed to be decent
despite the handicap of a mediocre (or worse) opening, so let's move on and see
what the game offers.
Well, okay one more thing--notice that it's almost always a bad sign if my first
reaction to your hook is NOT to frantically type something to get into the game
faster, but to sit back and analyze the ways in which your hook isn't hooking
me. Just saying.
OH SHINJO NO THE PROTAG IS MONOLOGUING AT ME Soliloquying? What is the proper
term here? NO PLEASE STOP OR I WILL FIGURE OUT HOW TO ENGINEER YOUR DEATH. It's
one thing if you're doing something fun like Rameses (I do realize not everyone
liked Rameses) but if you have a dull character and can't make him/her/it any
less dull, AT LEAST keep them from MONOLOGUING AT ME.
Okay, there are beta testers, but that doesn't surprise me. The game is
annoying, but doesn't strike me as outright abysmal.
This character is still maundering on about the situation. Listen, I feel like
two or three short, sharp sentences--if they were the right short, sharp
sentences--could have done the bulk of the setup work for you. IMNSHO err on the
side of brevity!
Monologue over for now. Let's hope it stays gone. No, it's back. *sob* What did
I ever do to deserve this?
Yes, PC, please be dead soon. Anything to make you shut up.
Hmm. I would have preferred a cut to the throne room unless I'm going to need
knowledge of the castle/dungeon layout to get around later? Naturally, I am not
mapping, my funeral.
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
This game just repaid the aggravation factor, although I sadly suspect it was
completely unintentional:
Lord Sulanar, Lord Gaxin, Lady Edukam, Lady Harridan, Lord Vonisor, Lord Reken
and Lord Adath
Did the author just name her LADY HARRIDAN??? *snorfle*
Well, that probably kills my ability to take this cod-medieval setting seriously
in and of itself, but the other problem is that the setting is...cod-medieval so
far. It's McFantasyStandardFare, which, in all fairness, the game broadcasts
from paragraph two, but still. Disappointing.
What, I'm not desperate enough to attack the wizard who is my friend? Allrighty
then, but don't say I didn't try. Well, at least PRAY admits a response, if not
actual divine intervention (but I wouldn't expect that anyway). Also, it is so
tempting to read "Alallsia" as "Allansia." (What? I love me some Fighting
Fantasy.)
This whole thing where you stand there and wait for everyone to give their
verdict is drawn out and tedious.
Oh wow, we just headed straight into WTF. This game is slightly train-wrecky,
isn't it? If the pacing issues are bad right now I hate to think of what will
transpire later. Anyway, WTF:
Using a slightly less powerful voice, Rixomas speaks again. “Your Majesty, you
need to make a judgement.”
“No!” the king cries, jumping up from the throne. Everyone, including you,
starts slightly at the sudden sound. The king paces across the dais and
continues to speak. “I am sick of all this formality, this ... this ... pompous
ritual. Don’t you have any idea what this is doing to me?”
Rixomas looks stunned for a moment. “But, your Majesty,” he says, “this is the
law.”
“And this is my family!” the king cries. There is no hiding the tears on his
face now. “This youth is my ward. I’ve cared for him for more than ten years. He
is like my son.”
“Your true son was murdered, sire,” the wizard replies. “Ward or not, he’s been
found guilty and punishment must be carried out. It’s your duty as king to do
this.”
“Oh, stop it will you! Just stop it! I know I’m the king, and I don’t need you
reminding me of that.”
The king pauses to survey the gathered nobility. “You’re all just sitting there,
expecting me to send my ward to his death as if it means nothing to me. But it
does! I’ve already lost my son; now I must lose my ward as well, and my daughter
loses her fiancé. I have to live with this decision, even if none of you have
to.”
“Sire, we understand this is difficult and that you haven’t truly had time to
grieve. But the law is the law. It’s what makes you king. It can’t Using a
slightly less powerful voice, Rixomas speaks again. “Your Majesty, you need to
make a judgement.”
Up till now I had no opinion of the king; now I have concluded that he is a
blithering idiot. Thank you so much, game.
Reading some of the nobles' descriptions already convinced me that the king's
power was relatively weak anyway. Now I see why!
This whole judgment scene involves me basically doing WAIT-type actions while
everyone else talks at me and I don't have any useful agency (attempts to ATTACK
people, to zone out by SLEEPing, etc. have all failed). This is a good design
decision why?
Okay, time out for a rant. Guys, if you find yourself writing a game where
there's this whole long section (I'm not talking about a few turns, I'm talking
about a lot of turns) where the game sort of barfs information at the PC that
the PC needs to have, but the PC has no agency and can't participate in the
scene in a substantive fashion, you need to either:
1. Redesign the scene to reduce the vomitous content. Make it shorter,
streamline it, cut stuff, cut lots of stuff, no really cut some more.
2. Resort to an actual cutscene. Note that #1 probably still applies. If you're
making me read more than two full screens of text in a cutscene (and it is
vastly preferable that a cutscene by limited to a full screen or a few
paragraphs wherever possible), cut, cut, cut. Or find some way to space out the
cutscenes, but really, cutting is frequently better.
3. Go back to the drawing board and figure out how to convey that information
while being interactive. This is interactive fiction. I want to spend most of my
time interacting, even if the interaction is on rails; you can do rails and make
me like it, but unless you're doing something very unusual (which this game is
not), you can't make something non-interactive and make me like it. If I wanted
a non-interactive experience, I would be watching physics sit-coms (well, I
shout at the screen, but you know) or reading static fiction. Please. Don't do
this to me.
Honestly, I just want to stop playing and get on with my life, but I am
determined to see if there's a kernel of salvageable gameplay in here. I have
just gotten to the part where I am offered the choice of being turned into a
rat, fox, or snake. This is where PC-vs.-player separation is very important
because I actually like all three creatures. (I say this as a city-dweller who
has never substantively had to deal with any of the three as pests.) Now look!
This is an important choice (I assume) and with any luck, it will significantly
shape the gameplay experience from here on. THIS is where the game should have
started.
You hear about the thing writers sometimes do where the "real" beginning of the
story is buried five pages (or more) into the manuscript. (This is not one of my
more common failure modes, although it has to have happened. I'm more likely
just to produce something that's completely incomprehensible.) Well, this is the
game equivalent right here.
It feels very weird to have the transformation spell's agony described as
"electrical fire." Ditto the use of the word "mutate." I guess it's hard to tell
what the sci/tech level is.
Really stupid question, do foxes have color vision? I notice there's color in
the Antechamber description, which doesn't appear to have changed. Okay, totally
random internet source claims they probably do [edit: fixed that].
Died in the castle. Okay, this is where a map would be handy, but I didn't do
it. I still maintain that starting the game here would have been better, though.
Weird buggy message:
>Z
You wait for something to happen.
Your vulpine hearing detects some sounds – movement to the east.
Your vulpine hearing detects some sounds – movement to the east.
Your vulpine hearing detects some sounds – movement to the east.
Okay, walkthrough time. Yay for walkthroughs!
Another display bug:
From the northern end of the courtyard comes the sound of a horse whinnying in
distress.
Your vulpine hearing detects some sounds – movement to the south.
From the northern end of the courtyard comes the sound of a horse whinnying in
distress.
Hmm, there seem to be puzzles that require a significant amount of waiting.
Excessive waiting feels very non-interactive and I'm not a fan of it in puzzles.
There is a sudden flick of the reigns and with a jolt the cart lurches forward.
Reins.
Oh, not another monologue. On the other hand, the mocking apparition was at
least interesting. Not greatly interesting, but interesting. Some evil sorcerer
with astral projection? Scrying?
Huh, the rake puzzle is cute. I feel like I have done that to myself, too.
More display bugs.
I am even more tired of the protag going on about Tevona than I am about the
protag going on.
An...interlude...you have got to be kidding me.
I am so confused by why I need to be in on this conversation. It feels like an
extensive infodump about things that I didn't care much about to begin with and
am caring even less about the more I have to hear about them. Also, I keep
wanting to read Ralyon Warriors as Rayon Warriors.
Oh dear Shinjo there's more "as you know, Bob." *weeps* Okay, look, at 7:30
p.m., unless this game improves dramatically--which I doubt--I call it quits. An
hour and a half is plenty.
Aha, I was supposed to look at the tapestry earlier. That's probably where the
apparition would've been familiar from.
Master Limos! One limo, two limos. So hard to take some of these fantasy names
seriously.
Please make this conversation shorter. My eyes are about to bleed out. And
please stop talking about Tevona. I am already determined to hate her. Maybe she
will secretly be conspiring with the evil sorcerer or whatever.
Oh I can't do this any longer.
Out: 7:20 p.m. (80 min.) with a saved game
Rating: 4. This game is cursed with mediocre prose, but even that wouldn't have
been such a big issue if it hadn't forced me to wade through so much of it. The
bigger problems lie in the game design--too much non-interactivity, too many
infodumps, starting the game way before the first really significant action the
player can take. The author has a fair amount of ambition: three separate play
paths (although I'm guessing the differences for replayability purposes are
largely cosmetic rather than substantive, I do not have the patience to play
this game through with all three walkthroughs), a lot of locations, etc. I hope
the author goes on to write more games, better ones. The two big take-away
messages I would give the author are: (a) remember to design around player
interaction and (b) always, always err on the side of brevity. If you have a lot
of cutscenes that go on for pages and pages, ditto non-interactive cutscenes,
you're doing it wrong.
Reviewed by MathBrush
This is a large Adrift game,
in which, after an extended prologue, you are cursed into a form of your
choosing: rat, fox, or snake.
As an animal, it is your job
to be restored to your original form and find your lost love, Princess Tevona.
Overall, this was done pretty well, but the Adrift
parser was pretty frustrating (I used Adrift Runner 4.0).
Reviews should be considered copyrighted by their respective authors.
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