| Home | About Me | |
|
|
DELRON
|
Land of the Mountain King
Author: Kenneth Pedersen
Date: 2017
ADRIFT 5
Reviewed by Jack Welch
This combat-based game is written in Adrift, so I know of two ways to play the game. It is distributed as a self-contained but relatively hefty (10+ MB) windows executable file, or you can load the blorb file into an Adrift version 5 interpreter, available from the Adrift website. Of the two, I would recommend grabbing the interpreter because you can later use it to play other Adrift games.
The story is minimal: you have been summoned by a witch to rid the land of the evil X, where X equals mountain king. I’m pretty sure that there is another game in this year’s competition where X equals wizard. This has been a boom year for witch subcontractors.
The ABOUT makes no bones regarding the nature of the game, the most important verb will be kill, followed by kill some more. The ABOUT is also helpful in highlighting use of a less common pair of verbs: equip and unequip to wield weapons.
[Some spoilers follow beyond this point]
Strategy for this game consists of finding something that you can kill, and which will not kill you first. I will say at least that the game is not cruel — you always know your status and can decide whether to press an attack or not. Also, if you get in over your head, you can always flee an encounter, and the opposing monster does not get an attack of opportunity as it might in some table top RPGs.
The game map is sparse, except for a cottage. In the somewhat furnished cottage, you can ask the little (actually, surprisingly heavy) old lady about the backstory and each monster, but her responses have little bearing on the game.
The monsters need to be encountered in a specific order: you start with bare fists and will need to obtain objects from each fight to take on succesive monsters. There is some randomness to attacks, so even properly outfitted, you run some risk of dying due to bad luck. I visited Valhalla a lot, but the game is lightweight and restarting is not a burden. The ABOUT itself suggests saving often, and that is good advice.
Using a general parser engine with all of Adrift’s bells and whistles seems like overkill for this game. The lighthouse location is a puzzle feature, but otherwise the game could consist entirely of movement and whacking creatures.
Story: 3
Voice: 4
Play: 6
Polish: 7
Technical: 6
JNSQ: 0
Preliminary Score: 5.2
Reviewed by Aziraphale
It was kind of this game to include a random combat warning, because at this
point that is in fact extremely upsetting to me.
Okay, jokes aside:
another fantasy combat game. I can’t decide whether I’m less inclined to look
favorably due to how many of these I’ve played, or more inclined because my
standards have been lowered. This one runs in ADRIFT, a fantastically old-school
looking contraption that I had to run in an included .exe file (which I was
extremely dubious about, but also didn’t want to install another interpreter
just for this game, so sketchy exes it is). The in-game map is appreciated, at
least.
I’m going to go ahead and state this game’s biggest flaw (which
might also be a flaw of the interpreter): it autoplays really annoying music
(could have also used a content warning for that!) and, while there is an option
to turn the music off, it turns back on every time you move between locations.
This is not really a traditional fight-a-monster game. It’s kind of a
puzzle in disguise. There’s a handful of monsters that you have to fight in an
extremely specific order; go outside of that order and you will almost certainly
die. Heck, you might die anyway, because the combat is random; I stopped playing
at the point where I died three times in a row to the monster I was supposed to
be fighting!
Even besides that bit of unfairness, figuring out what
monsters can kill you does not exactly feel “fun.” A lot of it is trial and
error; heck, the walkthrough recommends you save every time you kill something,
just in case. You need a weapon to kill most things, and there’s a point where
it looks like you can pick up a weapon, but nope: it triggers a battle. A battle
you can’t win without a weapon. And when you die, a sign smugly suggests that
you should try getting a weapon. Fun times. There’s an old woman who offers you
advice about monsters, and I thought maybe I was supposed to talk to her to get
advice on what I could fight. When I tried that, though, she gave me such
excellent advice as:
>ask about squid
“There are dangerous creatures
in the sea. One of them is a giant squid.”
Helpful!
There’s not
much else to judge the game on; writing is functional but sparse, there’s not
much depth to the story or the few characters, the one puzzle I did was fine but
looking at the walkthrough I probably would not have gotten the “trying to go in
a stated direction doesn’t work until you examine something arbitrary” or “wait
in a location until something happens” puzzles. This is a fantasy combat game
I’m not actually opposed to on premise, and I think I could have potentially had
a good time with it; the repeated random deaths just wore my spirit down too
far.
Rating: 4
Reviewed Christopher Huang
In this simple
RPG simulation, we're a viking hero tasked with defeating the eponymous Mountain
King, who lives in a castle on the other side of a ravine. But we've been
transported here without our weapons (thanks to magical limitations) so we've
got to go and kill us some monsters first to equip ourselves.
It's pretty
light. There's no levelling up, per se, though each defeated opponent nets us
something to aid us in our quest, be it a weapon, a better weapon, or improved
defences in the form of extra hit points. And that's pretty much it, really.
Kill a few monsters, face the mountain king, win. We're not given any form of
reaction to the thing that put us in this situation to begin with; as such,
there really isn't much of a story at all. The writing barely makes any effort
to hold the thing together.
It really feels like the skeletal beginnings
of something bigger. A sketch, if you will; something pencilled in with neither
shading nor colour. The coding is competent, at least, and I found no bugs. It's
entertaining enough if you like the whole "kill monsters, get their loot" thing,
but if you're looking for any story deeper than an unabashed excuse to go do
that, you're out of luck.
I call it bread and butter with a mug of warm
milk. It does a competent job of breakfast, but it doesn't exactly excite the
taste buds.
Reviewed by
xenoglossy
This is a well-constructed little RPG, and it was a nice breather after
going through a couple of the more unpolished games above; the only real issues
I had were, first, that even if you type "music off" the music will start again
when you enter another room, and, second, that it took me about five million
tries to beat the ogre even though I was as prepared for the fight as it's
possible to be. I beat the final boss on the third try and the ogre took me at
least twice that, probably more, which seems like something that shouldn't be
happening even with heavily RNG-based combat. Other than that, I didn't have any
mechanical or gameplay issues with it. It is, however, a game that doesn't
really distinguish itself in terms of mechanics or writing from a ton of similar
RPGs that are out there. There's a ton of stuff in the same vein that's in some
way more sophisticated or inventive than this is, so there's just not that much
reason to play this particular one.
Reviewed by MathBrush
I helped beta test this
game.
This game meets my niche interests well. It is a combat random
combat RPG in a fantasy setting, where it's mostly puzzle-based; most monsters
are extremely difficult to defeat until you solve another puzzle, than become
generally easy. It allows for some variability, though, as you can sequence
break or die in an easy fight due to randomness.
I thought this was fun.
A couple of times I felt thwarted by not knowing what to do, though.
Reviews should be considered copyrighted by their respective authors.
| Any donation would be much appreciated to help keep the site online and growing. | To help make your donation quicker and
easier just click the "Donate" button and you will be taken to the secure Paypal donation page. |
|
| Home | About Me |
