Poor Amanda, I got the tool back without effort and remember that I tried first moving the cabinet.
3 Likes
You could also have tried LOOK BEHIND CABINET, which I thought was obvious, but players always find a way to stymie my expectations! 
3 Likes
This is a true old-fashioned puzzly text adventure. You’re a badass warrior grrrl on Mars tasked with rescuing a celebrity who has been captured by your arch-nemesis. He in fact is the one that invites you to rescue her in hopes that he’ll destroy you when you storm his Martian compound. It’s a supremely silly set-up, but it works.
The puzzles are easy for the first half of the game, and then they get harder and less clued. I did get stuck at one place because of my own stupidity (see above posts), but there were a few places that required doing things that weren’t particularly sensible (eg: Why couldn’t I just pour the gel on the mauve robot from above? Well, you just can’t). Although this can be frustrating, it is well in line with the ethos of the traditional text adventure, so try things that seem silly.
I solved the final puzzle by accident-- I typed UP, meaning to try and get on the General’s flyer and hook my cable to it, but UP took me to the top of the cage instead, which was not something I had considered doing– but I probably would have gotten there on my own with some more tinkering.
The story is zippy and the writing works, but it’s all in service of the puzzles, which again is classic old-school stuff. There were some minor implementation problems: some blank responses to actions, some unimplemented scenery, some disambiguation issues. But they were minor irritants in an overall smooth experience. And I should add that this appears to be game 1 of a series; I think we can probably expect a Galaxy Jones 2 at some point. I played this in bursts, stopping when I got stuck, so it’s hard to say what my play time was. Maybe about 2 hours of actual playing, and about 2-3 hours of thinking breaks?
I recommend it if you’re in the mood to wrestle with some parser puzzles. I think it manages to hit the sweet spot of increasing puzzle difficulty, and the puzzles are solvable if you think outside the box a little. Feel free to hit me up for a hint if you get stuck.
Edit: There are several fail states in this games, particularly once you reach the 10th floor, so you will need to save occasionally.
What bird is it? It’s a Peregrine falcon. Small but deadly, acrobatic and intelligent. Galaxy Jones may have been the underdog to the powerful General, but he underestimated her beak and talons.
16 Likes
Thanks for playing my game and for such nice words! Did you happen to note what blank responses you got, etc? Thought I had wiped them all out!
7 Likes
I played online, so I didn’t keep a transcript, which was very rude of me, as I like to get transcripts and I should know better. I’m going to amend my hypocritical ways.
I do remember getting a blank response for POUR GEL ON SOMETHING. Maybe the elevator floor? And I think there was one more, but I can’t remember it. They really were quite minor.
4 Likes
This is Joey’s first game, and it’s been awesome to watch its progression on the forum. There’s a “Survival Guide” which you should definitely read before playing. I admit my eyes got a little wide on reading it, because it is long and there are many non-standard actions and rules and I thought I might be lost while playing. But the game starts off gently enough, allowing you some time to get used to its format.
I picked “Prey Tutorial Mode” to play in, and probably so should you unless you tweak immediately to all the special commands. The set-up is TOTALLY AWESOME, and I don’t want to say anything about it so you’ll come to it without preconceptions. But it’s a hell of a good sci-fi/horror raison d’être.
The game is all about exploring to find hidden objects. The map is large, and there’s a MAP command that shows you available exits. You’re running from a predator, hoping to find the objects before the predator finds you, and there are lots of ways you can give your location away, but also defensive actions you can take to escape if you are caught. The amount of coding under the hood keeping track of closed/open doors, and where you’ve been, must be staggering-- this is an extremely Designed game and I was floored by the amount of work it must have been to implement everything.
I know, because the author said so, that this game was not as well-tested as it should have been, but it plays really smoothly and I didn’t encounter any major problems, and only a handful of very minor ones. It feels about as well-implemented as the majority of well-tested games in Comps.
“I Am Prey” is obviously made for maximum replayability, which is something I don’t normally do, but I may very well pick this one up and try again after I get through more ST games. I got killed after a few tours through the huge complex and finding 3 objects (about 45-60 minutes of play), and I hadn’t explored any Parkour routes, or tried many of the defensive commands on offer. I really enjoyed making my map, zinging around the map looking for stuff, and the genuine pressure of feeling hunted while I roamed. But I definitely didn’t experience all this game has to offer on my first play through.
I recommend this highly-- it’s got the feel of a first-person video game while being a parser game, and that’s quite an achievement. If you like large maps, cat-and-mouse setups, and treasure hunting while under the gun, this game is absolutely for you. Great job, Joey!!!
What bird is it? It’s a shrike. Not a large or showy bird, but implacably violent and deadly as it impales its prey on the nearest sharp object and then sings over it.
17 Likes
I’m not crying happy tears; you are. Someone is cutting an onion on this forum. I am being totally normal about this.
I’m really happy you enjoyed the game!! 
Admittedly, it didn’t feel as intense while I was coding it, but when I look back on it now, it’s…quite a bit, lol. Multiple sections exceed 2,000 lines of code. The process has been wild.
I owe all the smoothness to my amazing testing team. The chunk of game that went untested is entirely my own fault, but the smoothness everywhere else is possible only through their amazing work and transcripts.
The English language fails to let me express how honored I am to read this right now.
Thank you for the time you spent in the game, and I’m overjoyed that you had a lot of fun!
13 Likes
Not sure if it was coincidental or intentional, but fantastic and very appropriate scifi reference with the choice of bird:
Also, congrats Jess! Way to swing for the fences!
7 Likes
Ha, I had the same thought!
6 Likes
@inventor200 Just so you know, my fellow Tadsperson, I took a peek at your game and it looks intense! I’m not blessed with much playing time right now, but I look forward to eventually seeing what you cooked up!
7 Likes
Nothing Could Be Further From the Truth by @keturion
I did not get very far into this game. I gave it 2 hours, and then decided that it was simply too cruel for me and I didn’t want to play anymore.
That’s too bad, because the setup is really fun, the writing is terrific, the tone is goofily dystopian, the characterization of the PC is relatable, and it has pretty much everything I could want in a game. But my lord, the cruelty. I found myself testing out commands and then typing UNDO for every command that didn’t work (which was most of them), because the timer is merciless. I reloaded a save about 20 times in those two hours, typed UNDO over 50 times, and that was just for the first real puzzle (hiding the bodies), which I did not complete.
I look forward to seeing other reviews, because it’s possible that I am just having an extremely knuckle-dragging day. Evidence for this hypothesis is that I misspelled a word (contraption → contaption) at one point, didn’t notice that, thought it didn’t work, and so got stuck enough to have to ask for a hint. There are in-game hints, but I didn’t find them very helpful, as I know what to do; it’s just that coming up with the right commands in the right order to beat the timer is really hard for me, and I don’t find it very fun.
I do recommend that everyone try it, because when I started play, I said to myself, “Self, you’re going to LOVE this game.” T’was not to be for me (this is clearly the game the author meant to write, and if it isn’t for me, that’s OK), but it will be so for others. If you don’t mind undoing and reloading after every few moves in order to find the right actions in a strictly timed manner, you’ll be golden here.
What bird is it? It’s a cassowary. Ridiculously silly and fun-looking, with all sorts of charming attributes that make you want to hug it. But it will rip you into bloody shreds if you do.
Commentary on error messages:
If you misspell something in this game, the standard response is “Can’t do it” instead of some variation on “I don’t know that word.” So spotting your own mistakes, especially in longer words, is harder to do. Getting your error messages right for the myriad of possible player screwups is a painfully difficult thing to do, and I have never managed it well so this is less criticism and more whining, but this was part of the difficulty for me in this game.
12 Likes
Amanda, I love your comparing the game to a cassowary. I have never heard of a cassowary, but your reasoning speaks for itself.
I’m glad you tried the game. I hope you had a little fun. Yes, the game is cruel in the way you describe. As you say, I imagine it won’t be for everyone. I didn’t do that on purpose, of course. It’s just the nature of the beast.
Thanks for your time - and for the comparison to a cassowary!
8 Likes
It’s a shame you didn’t get past the bodies… there are large stretches in the middle of the game where you can experiment without a ticking death clock. But oh, yes, Oliva Mirram has no shortage of ways to die… that’s just a thing. Outside of the timer context, I think the puzzles have quite a satisfying level of difficulty.
3 Likes
I got to a place in my life (which we call “old”) where I just don’t have patience for constantly restoring games. Been there, done that for the first 20 years of my IF life. Wrestling with hard puzzles is one thing; wrestling with all the UNDO and RESTORE is another.
That said, it’s a totally valid and time-honored way to make a game and there are loads of people who thrill to this. I hope my review made it clear that this is a particular quirk of mine and not a reflection on the game’s quality.
5 Likes
How, uh, old is “old” anyway? Asking for a friend.
4 Likes
I’m 51. And let’s not kid ourselves, that isn’t midlife anymore. It’s early old.
7 Likes
I can verify this statement.
5 Likes
Many of us are in the fifties, and as said: If you wake up in the morning with no pain, you are dead surely.
By the way one thing is to play with a game and another that the game plays with you.
7 Likes
It could be that the time box at the start of the game is too short and therefore cruel. I am certainly open to the idea that the puzzles must be tweaked to provide a better experience. I think the community will be the final arbiter on that point.
Also, I was looking at the hints last night, and they can use a refresh. “Lobby” (number 9) was originally called “Getting Rid of the Bodies”, but I didn’t want to reveal even that bit of information before the scene occurred, so I renamed it to “Lobby”. However, the hints for the vending machine are not there. And at least one hint refers to the section “Getting Rid of the Bodies”.
4 Likes
Stygian Dreams by Giorgos Menelaou (I couldn’t find a user name to tag the author with, so if anyone knows it, give me a shout.)
This is a back garden entry, and the author acknowledges its lack of polish in the Comp blurb. And that’s true-- it could definitely use some polish. But there’s a lot to like here regardless.
Do not play the blorb file of the game-- play the online version. I tried the downloadable game in Spatterlight, and didn’t get any images, plus there was so much scenery that was unimplemented that it was hard to know what nouns in the descriptions were important. The online version is a parser/click hybrid that highlights the important stuff so you can just click on it instead of trying to examine every noun to find the implemented one. Additionally, there’s some really cool AI-generated art in the online version.
It’s largely a walking simulator, where you move from location to location (with some difficulty as exits aren’t always listed, so you simply need to try all the cardinal directions) in a world of Greek mythology. There are no puzzles, and few actions you can take, but there’s nothing wrong with that. It is frustrating that so little of the interesting scenery is interactive, so mostly you can appreciate the description of the scene, but not the bits that make it up.
In my attempts at both the Inform version and the online version, I hit a wall after about 15 minutes where I couldn’t find anything else to do (where the statue is). It’s possible that I just hit the end of the game, but I don’t think so-- I think it just wasn’t obvious what to do next. So I wandered around the areas I had access to, trying to find new directions or objects I’d missed, but no such luck. Admittedly, I didn’t spend a long time doing this.
This is a pleasant experience with some good mythological background, but it doesn’t really seem to have a plot line, and it’s not intuitive at all what you should be doing to advance the game. I’d play through again if there was a little more direction given, or a better sense of where I can go and what my goal is. The author says on the online play page, “You don’t really need to do much” and that’s OK. But there should definitely be some rhyme or reason to what the player can/should do to complete the story. As it stands, I recommend you check it out, but don’t expect a full game with the basic parser conventions implemented.
What bird is it? You can see a bird drifting lazily on the wind high in the sky, but it’s too far away to tell exactly what it is.
.
.
.
That’s the last full-length parser game in Spring Thing, except for @kamineko 's Repeat the Ending, which I was a tester for. At the end of my reviews, I hope to post something about the games I tested, but you should definitely play RtE-- it’s a highly unusual game with a very cool mechanic.
On to full-length choice games.
11 Likes