It’s TALP Jam time again - and yet again, I didn’t quite make the deadline this year (watch out for my time travel themed beginners’ game in ParserComp probably). So I’ll be reviewing all the games that did make it into the competition. Fingers crossed for some beginner-friendly gems!
11 Likes
Home Party by Zeno Pillan
Summary
This is an Inform 7 game set at a student house party. It’s a bit of a sandbox – you can type QUEST for a mid-game objective, but by and large the gameplay appears to be exploring the house, looking at stuff, talking to people, drinking a beer, watching YouTube, playing Playstation games… generally the kind of stuff you would do as an actual university student at an actual house party in the ‘00s. This makes it a relatively realistic game (especially for people of my vintage) – give or take the trippy bit where reading a Lonely Planet guidebook transports you to the locale in question – but I found the direction very vague and unhelpful, especially for what is supposed to be a beginners’ game. The second time I typed HINT, I was told ‘just talk to everyone about everything and show them everything you’ve found!’ – and there are a lot of characters, objects and topics in this game. I found it overwhelming and I think beginners would too.
The tutorial does a fairly good job of prompting the player to form verb-noun commands, though the direction section (looking north etc. instead of travelling there) could be a little confusing.
The author is a non-native English speaker and the English can be a bit rough. This is the case both in the game text and the Itch documentation, and I sometimes found the latter hard to understand.
The implementation could also use a bit of work. An example: there’s an envelope on the kitchen table, described in the object list as ‘an empty envelope with a curious blade in’. On examination: ‘An anonymous and boring envelope, probably a bill.’ But… the object list says it has a blade in it? Even though it’s empty? And you can’t pick up the envelope because it’s scenery, so ‘hardly portable’. This is the kind of thing that I would expect to be ironed out with a bit of testing, so it’s surprising to see it from a game with testers credited.
On the whole, I can live with rough English and implementation issues if I’m having fun. It’s not great in a game for beginners, but I can live with it. Unfortunately, though, I didn’t find this game very fun, because in general I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing – and I definitely don’t think I would have found it a good experience as a beginner parser player.
7 Likes
Your review of ‘Home Party’ sounds about right. I started playing it last night and I’m finding it very confusing. This is a bit embarrassing, as I’m listed as one of the testers, but the version I tested was dated 28 May 2024, and the current version is practically a new game. I think it really needed another round of testing after it was rewritten.
2 Likes