I’ve posted a short review on my blog: blog.templaro.com/review-antiquest/
- Jack
This seems to be made mostly tongue in cheek. You wake up alone in a spaceship, everyone else in stasis but you. The exit from your cabin to the corridor is to the west, but once you’re in the corridor, there’s just a mention it runs north and south, with no mention of your cabin. Trying to go back east, you end up in a new location. Also, trying to go a direction not mentioned in a room description makes the hero start digging the floor/breaking the walls and thus finding new locations. The grammatical person of the story is not stable - x me yields “I am wearing a white patient gown.” but ‘inventory’ yields “You are empty-handed.” There seem to be 13 endings that are found quite by chance. I managed to find two but didn’t bother to play more than that. There’s some juvenile humor in the wanderings of the protagonist around the ship, but whether you want to find all 13 endings is a question of personal taste and perseverance.
4
Good reviews above. Just a couple of points for me to tack on:
There’s something to be said for a game that can track the different endings that you reach in the same session, restarting you automatically. We’ve seen that, but not often enough, within a fleet of recent games whose chief draw is to find multiple paths through.
Ultimately, this one is not written interestingly enough to keep most players engaged, I imagine, in a completely unpredictable input/output relationship.
There’s a very interesting idea at the core, though: to respond positively to nearly all commands, expanding the world whenever necessary to accommodate them. For a while, I thought that may have been what was happening, but closer examination reveals a much smaller implemented world. There aren’t that many locations. There’s nothing you can permanently interact with. Most commands just turn out to be a shortcut to another room or another ending. And the high success rate of commands is largely a function of the small set of objects that are mentioned. Still, this gives me–and hopefully others–some ideas.
Thank for reviews. Yes, my game was some kind of parser experiment and I see there a lot of misconnections. The underlaying idea was people to guess what happened on the ship by collecting all endings.