Mathbrush's IFComp 2023 Reviews (Latest: Milliways)

Competitions IFComp
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Reviews so far (alphabetical):
20 Exchange Place
All Hands
All Hands Abandon Ship
All the Troubles Come My Way
Antony & Cleopatra: Case IV: The Murder of Marlon Brando
Artful Deceit
Assembly
Bali B&B
Beat Witch
Bright Brave Knight Knave
Codename Obscure
Creative Cooking
Death on the Stormrider
Detective Osiris
Dr Ludwig and the Devil
Dysfluent
Eat the Eldritch
Escape Your Psychosis
The Finder’s Commision
Fix Your Mother’s Printer
For Eternity Again and Again
Gameception
Gestures Towards Divinity
The Gift of What You Notice More
Have Orb Will Travel
Hawkstone
Help! I Can’t Find My Glasses!
Honk!
In the Details
Into the Lion’s Mouth
Kaboom
Lake Adventure
Lake Starlight
Last Valentine’s Day
Last Vestiges
The Library of Knowledge
The Little Match Girl 4
Lonehouse
The Long Kill
Lunium
My Brother the Parasite
My Pseudo-Dementia Exhibition
One King to Loot Them All
Out of Scope
Please Sign Here
Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head
The Sculptor
A Thing of Wretchedness
To Sea in a Sieve
Trail Stash
Tricks of Light in the Forest
We All Fall Together
The Whale’s Keeper
Who Iced Mayor McFreeze
The Whisperers
The Witch

Beta Tested games (will review last):
Barcarolle in Yellow
Hand Me Down
How Prince Quisborne the Feckless Shook His Title
Magor Investigates
Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Paintball Wizard
The Vambrace of Destiny

Games I plan to skip because they sound too sexy/profane for me:
Citizen Makane
Dick McButts Gets Kicked in the Nuts
Ribald Bat Lady Plunder Quest
Xanthippes Last Night with Socrates

Games I plan on skipping because they’re not archived (unless author wants me to review):
The Enigma of Solaris
Meritocracy
One Does Not Simply Fry
Paper Magician
Shanidar, Safe Return
Virtue

In this thread, I will be reviewing games.

I’m looking forward to playing the games! I plan on prioritizing games that are on unusual platforms or which look difficult to play or long. This is because such games tend not to get many reviews. I will also be waiting to review games I beta tested until near the end.

Based on feedback in this thread, I won’t be posting numerical scores during comp. I will copy my reviews to IFDB and ‘embargo’ them to appear with scores after ifcomp is over. This is a personal choice and not one I think everyone has to follow; I like seeing scores!

This year I will only be reviewing games which are archived as part of the competition, and will exclude self-hosted games, including games on itch. This is because I primarily play and review games as part of an attempt to study interactive fiction over time, mapping its history and trying to make connections. Games which are not archived have recently begun disappearing, due either to authors not hosting them anymore or getting upset with the community and deleting them. I don’t feel there’s much point in reviewing and studying games that are likely to disappear.

But I know some authors didn’t know about that and that some authors like reviews, so if there’s an author with an ‘ephemeral’ game that’s self hosted that wants a review, please message me and I’ll include it in the list!

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Artful Deceit

This was one of the better experiences I’ve had with a custom parser game written for a retro format.

This game was written for the Commodore 64 platform and must be played in an emulator. I played with the Vice emulator.

It is a murder mystery. It comes with a great deal of background material. There are feelies with long, in-depth interviews with each of the suspects. There are also guides on what can be typed. I found it necessary to read every single feelie and command guide and manual to complete the game, as there are essential components you will likely not find without help (such as the important ANALYZE command).

The setting and game style is intentionally reminiscent of old Infocom mysteries such as Deadline and Suspect. There is a single house with multiple independent NPCs moving about and various clues.

I’ll talk a bit about things that were frustrating and things that worked well.

Frustrations came mostly from the engine and parser. The Commodore 64 emulator I had imitated its old clunkiness. Each room takes several seconds to load. If you go the wrong way and want to turn around, it’s 20 seconds just to correct your mistake. There was a ‘speed up’ button which I used, however, it caused the space bar to wig out, making only one-word commands possible in fast mode (great for navigation). At one point while messing with speed and trying to type ‘E’ I made the emulator hang up; I don’t believe it was the game’s fault.

Some commands were a bit difficult to phrase. One must type ‘interior garage door’; ‘interior door’ will not suffice. TALK TO someone and OPEN something almost always returned a blank line with no response at all.

The story and motives were lavishly described but stretched the imagination a bit. I’m not sure the motive found in the game would hold up in court, and some of the puzzles felt a bit arbitrary.

Those are the frustrating points. The good points are that outside of the above-mentioned difficulties, the parser was quite robust. I was frequently able to do what I wanted in an easy fashion. Puzzles were well-clued; I only turned to the walkthrough to speed up after I had the game crash. I do recommend playing on your own first without the walkthrough as it can help explain some of the more unusual action choices. I do think I would have had to turn to a walkthrough no matter what, though.

Other good things are the reasonable scope of the entry. With the slow emulation and the minimal parser, a long game could have stretched patience thin. This game seems well designed and compact, and is more fair (in my opinion) than the original infocom games. All interactable items are listed at the end of the paragraph, so you don’t have to worry about whether scenery contains an important clue.

In the past, I’ve had many bad experiences with custom parser and retro platforms. I’d say that this was genuinely refreshing and was, compared to those experiences, satisfying. For someone unaccustomed to such platforms I could imagine there would be much frustration. I also found the feelies to be very high quality (although there is a ‘images go here’ section that I believe will eventually be corrected). If I could change one thing, it’d be allowing ‘X’ as look at. I appreciate the game and was glad to play it!

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Under VICE, you should not insert warp mode, but go to the setting and set off “true drive emulation” (whose main function is indeed truly emulating the slow speed (300 bytes/s, IIRC) of C='s drive interface…

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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It looks like I actually was using C64 Forever. I’ll switch next time!

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The Witch

I played this game because it was a ‘longer than two hours’ parser adventure, so one that I would consider might be difficult to complete.

You play as an elf in a village that has suddenly been kidnapped en masse by a witch. You have to look through all the elves’ abandoned houses and workplaces and get the tools and items you need!

This game can be pretty tricky. I made two attempts in playing. In the first, I carefully explored, and discovered some locations where timing was essential. For instance, there is a mine with a lamp, and the lamp has a limited battery. I had to save and undo several times to get that right. Then there were a few other ways for objects to get lost forever.

Increasing the difficulty was a carrying limit, so I had to drop things at different times. There were a lot of containers I could throw things in, but those too had a carrying capacity. Sometimes containers got weird (I had a jug of mead and at one point I was carrying the mead outside of the jug). I’ve had my own issues implementing liquids in containers though so I know how it is!

Unfortunately, after I had escaped and got a bit stuck and turned to the walkthrough, I couldn’t find something mentioned in it while I was wandering up and down the river and, to my sadness, I hit the turn limit and died at about 50 points.

The turn limit seems like a fixed limit, around 600 moves, and so there was no way to undo far enough to keep going. I had to start over, and, fearing similar problems, followed the walkthrough precisely this time.

Before using the walkthrough, I encountered a maze that was actually pretty neat. It’s a ‘twisty little passages’ maze (i.e. a maze where all rooms are identical, or almost so, and going back the way you came doesn’t always take you forward), but the only directions are UP and DOWN, so you have to navigate your way through. I reminded me of the cramped/claustrophobic area in Andrew Plotkin’s So Far a bit.

Some of the puzzles after turning to the walkthrough seemed really hard to solve, especially the finale; I wonder if there are hints you can find elsewhere that can help you with them.

I’ve attached a transcript. It has some bugs in it I’ve marked here and there. Overall, I was glad to beat the witch!

treebrush.txt (127.7 KB)

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For me in VICE, this resulted in a bug: “Please insert game diskette” after going north, which did not happen when true drive emulation is on. [perhaps we should make a new topic about this particular game?]. For me, a better method to speed up the game is BEFORE turning on warp-mode, you go to file->Monitor and type: > +650 +127 (including the “>”-sign). Then you won’t have problems with space when running at warp speed. Even more speed is achieved by disabling the unused sound playback. I reach about 1200% speed this way without a problematic space key.

EDIT: I made a topic for this over here: Artful Deceit - emulator settings

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Hawkstone

This one was a bit of a wild ride.

It’s a long game written for windows. At first I wondered if it was another secret BJ Best game (in the past he’s entered a retro game under a fake name). After all, it has a cool animated loading screen and a neat pixel art inventory picture.

But the author has introduced himself elsewhere and it seems to be just a neat-looking original game by a new author.

So, this game is a mix of combat RPG and Scott Adams-style gameplay. The Scott Adams style is a fun one, but it had two features that I wasn’t used to: the location description is always at the top of the screen (unless you swap to inventory view), and if steps or a door are in the location you type GO STEPS or GO DOOR instead of any specific direction. These tripped me up a bit; especially not needing to LOOK, since LOOK gives a pretty unusual response in this game.

The idea is that a ferry you were on crashed and you need to explore. There is some combat, but most of it is with small and/or goofy things. Beyond that, you have to find a way to enter the city of Hawkstone and discover the secrets beneath it.

I played around without the walkthrough for a while, but had to peek at it to find the right command for dealing with the gate early on. After that, I found a lot more interesting things, and found a way to die.

After a while, I started getting pretty confused. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s going on, due to procedurally generated text. For instance, one action resulted in this (blocking out some names for spoilers, [REDACTED] is by me):

You attempt to unlock the [REDACTED] with the [REDACTED].
object is unlockable. You have a key.
You unlock the [REDACTED] with the [REDACTED]
You roll the dice on your stats and get.. +1 stamina.
Your Stats have increased!
You did a thing!
Something happened somewhere.
Argh!
A kerfuffle!
You are knocked over as a monkee jumps at you.
The monkee screeches as he runs away through the crevice..
You did a thing!
You did something!
Something happened somewhere.

After events like this, objects will be added to your inventory or appear in the room description.

The puzzles were fairly difficult, so I ended up using the walkthrough for a while. Even with the walkthrough, I took about two hours.

There are lots of compelling and interesting elements in the game, like a world you can substantially affect in various ways. There are a lot of silly and goofy things in the game, like buying things on the ‘net’. I’m not sure there’s a major resolution to the game; I followed the walkthrough and it seems to just peter out near the end, with there being some nice resolution to some plot points, but I think the game is intended to either have an open, exploration ending (or there’s more that isn’t in the walkthrough).

A lot of items have a generic description; looking at a woman hanging upside down by a rope says ‘That looks like a normal woman hanging upside down by a rope’. A lot of puzzles get repeated over and over (I’m looking at the bananas here). And, finally, there are several commands in the walkthrough that aren’t really described elsewhere in the game (like Q for Quests).

The overall user interface is great. The animations at the beginning are really neat, and the layout looks nice overall. I also liked the saga of the monkee character the most.

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Escape Your Psychosis

This is a choose your own adventure pdf. The last one of these in IFComp I’d heard of was Simon Christiansen’s Trapped in Time, which was a long pdf and included a system for maintaining inventory through loops.

This game is different. It’s a bit shorter, and focuses on a real-life situation: psychosis. It describes different episodes that can happen in the life of someone with psychosis and ways that it can be treated.

It also has very well-done drawings that add significantly to the game.

Overall, I found it small but interesting and would definitely check out future work by this team!

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Brave Bright Knave Knight

This is definitely one of the heftier IFComp games; I took a whole evening to look at it, spending two hours playing it and then speeding through with the walkthrough and thinking about it for a while after.

This is the 6th in a series of games that are all based on the same concept: rhyming pairs of words. Progress in the game consists of walking around/exploring and taking the names of rooms or objects and finding another pair of words that rhymes with them (like the name of the game itself).

Andrew Schultz has written many wordplay games over time (more than 40!) but I think this concept has proven the most productive, given the number of games that have been produced with the rhyming pairs.

I’d like to describe what this game has in common with the earlier games and what’s unique to it.

First, in common: This game is set in a kind of abstract land, reminding me a lot of The Phantom Tollbooth, where abstract concepts are taken literally. By removing the need for all items to be concrete or to fit into a unified setting (like a fantasy world or spaceship), it opens up the opportunity to include a ton more of the rhyming pairs.

Another thing in common is that the game is centered on an emotional journey of sorts. with a lot of focus on emotions and experiences. I said earlier that the game doesn’t have a unified setting, and while that’s true physically, each game has a unique emotional setting, a journey of self actualization that changes from game to game. Most games have an enemy that represent negative social traits such as bullying, peer pressure, cruelty, lying, pandering, or other bad traits, which the protagonist can only defeat after a great deal of personal growth. Not every game has these exact ingredients, because there is a lot of variety.

So that brings us to the unique parts of this game. First, its personal journey is quite a bit different from the others; rather than the hero alone reading books or psyching themself up, they help others. You can grab a whole lot of friends to walk around with you, each of which can help you in different ways. You can also find some people who have been wronged that you can bolster and lift up. Your friends’ journey becomes your journey, in a way. Overall, I liked the positive atmosphere.

You’re also provided with a list of items to get, which I found helpful as a way to track my progress in game.

It’s also pretty hard; while you can just go through the alphabet plus some letter combinations, it can be tricky to come up with solutions. I’d recommend one of two different play styles:
1-Taking a long time on the game, with breaks between sessions, to let yourself find everything.
2-Explore for a while to get as many answers as you can before getting stumped, then using the walkthrough to get to a new area and repeating.

This is definitely one of those games that you can figure out early on if you like it or not. The puzzle types and themes are very consistent, so you can try out the first few rooms to see if you feel like playing more or not. I’m glad I saw the end, even if I needed some help to get there.

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Thank you so much for playing my game :slight_smile: I’ve been in a bit of a funk the last couple of days, thinking no one would even see it and all the hard work I put in was for nothing.

I started the game from scratch 3 months ago. I mean really from scratch. I heard about the competition and decided to put in long hours learning c++ to make the game in. I had so much more planned, but lost too much time debugging the framework that I didn’t get to tweak all the planned game data. 90% of the data was hand inputted in the last week of the competition, so I don’t fault anyone for thinking it’s not quite polished enough. I do have more time to polish it now and look forward to making a sequel for next year.

Not sure who secret BJ is, but I’ll have to find their stuff and give them a whirl.

Edit: trying to find secret BJ was a huuuge mistake. RIP my Steam Discovery queue.

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Wow! That’s a really impressive game for just three months of development. A sequel sounds like it could be even cooler.

BJ Best is a recent winner of the competition. He entered multiple games at once, and one was a retro game in an older system entered under a pseudonym; it later tied in with his main game.

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Have Orb Will Travel

This is I think the 5th Jim MacBrayne game I’ve played, and I think it’s definitely the most fair and well scoped of them that I’ve played; either that or I’m simply getting used to their internal logic.

These games are all written in a custom engine that is remarkably smooth, as least here. For those new to Jim MacBrayne games, the most unusual feature is that if an object is in a container or on a supporter, you can’t take it; trying to will say ‘You don’t see any…’. I believe this is due to the fact that tracing through the contents of all the supporters and containers is too hard for the engine to handle. Instead, you have to say TAKE ALL FROM ____. There is a shortcut specifically for that (F1).

Anyway, the main idea of the game is that you are hunting through a cottage and adjoining area for a mysterious orb, with clues left behind by a circle of elders.

Most of the puzzles revolve around enigmatic devices that you have to figure out, interspersed with riddles and codes that explain how to use them.

I was able to get pretty far on my own; although I only got 70 points by the two hour mark, when I checked the walkthrough I was about 40% through the game. The puzzles are tough but fair; the place where I got stuck was due to not remember a clue from earlier.

The setting is very abstract, and much like Zork in its mix of fantasy and modern aesthetics.

I was glad to play this game, and hope Jim MacBrayne is able to enjoy coding up games for a while to come.

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Gestures Toward Divinity

I have to preface this review by saying that I have always that that Francis Bacon, the renaissance guy, was the same as Francis Bacon, the scary pope painting guy. I thought it was just some kind of über-Protestant thing. This game really cleared that up!

I was excited while playing this game, although perhaps not for a reason the author would have foreseen. I’ve been making an area in my own game which is a puzzleless museum placed adjacent to conversation heavy areas, and I was wondering how many conversation topics would be appropriate, and how large of a museum would make sense, and whether players should be able to lawnmower all topics or have to pick and choose.

So when I saw this puzzleless museum conversation game, I was very intrigued to poke around at the mechanics and see my overall impression. So while the game seems far more focused on story than mechanics, this review will focus a bit more on the latter.

The setup is that you are in a museum with three main rooms, each with a triptych of paintings. The paintings are real paintings by Francis Bacon; I was able to look them all up and see what they looked like in real life.

Examining the paintings and walking around the museum gives you the opportunity to converse with various figures, each of which has their own opinion on Francis Bacon. The NPCs are also adaptable, and you can change their opinion of you and willingness to talk by various actions, in a way I haven’t seen much of since games like Galatea and Blue Lacuna (although on a smaller scale here).

Topics are listed, and as you talk they change, although the change isn’t notified. You can ask about some things not on the list (for instance, I asked an early character about Christ, since the topic of the painting was Golgotha).

There are also several achievements, allowing for some puzzle elements. Some of them are straightforward, while others might be difficult to think about. Several achievements involved exhausting conversation trees, which I honestly did not want to do; not because I didn’t want to see more text, but by picking only the topics I wanted, I felt I had agency, but exhausting the tree didn’t feel ‘agent-y’. ‘Agentic’?

This game has some very heavy themes: sexual abuse and rape, violent assaults, traumatic death, obsession, religion, broken relationships, and so on. But all of it is examined in a thoughtful way, from a distance. None of these things are glorified; instead, different observers comment on it, some finding it deeply repugnant, others finding beauty in pain.

There is a great deal of strong profanity, and some of the language around Christ made me feel uncomfortable (as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), but I understand the author’s choices here and the effect they were going for. So while those parts weren’t for me, much of the game was, and I plan on rating this very highly. Beyond just appreciating the game’s messages, I also learned and grew as an author by reading this work, which is the highest compliment I am capable of giving.

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Kaboom

This is a game translated from Russian that has quite a bit of twists and turns in it. Most are discovered early on.

I’ll say that a game with a sleeping woman and ‘16+’ and referring to ‘your mistress’ turned out to be something very different than I was expecting. It turns out to be a grim tale about the effects of war but with a sweet perspective.

More on the setting:
You are the toy rabbit of a little girl. Sleeping in her bed one night, you have a horrifying nightmare, and when you wake, it turns out a bomb has destroyed most of the house.

Following Toy Story style rules, you can move but only when humans aren’t looking. You have to combine various items you can find to attract the attention of humans.

The gameplay style is Twine with inventory management and location state tracking. So you can move objects from room to room, and your constant inventory of things like hands and feet change in their function over time.

The puzzles are fairly tricky but logical. One thing I might have appreciated was automatically ‘looking’ after travelling to each new location, since what’s in each location often changes due to your actions. I also had a bit of trouble some times mentally picturing how all the different locations related to each other.

I think this is around a 1-2 hour game, although I used the walkthrough for part of it. I like the concept, and appreciated the dedication at the end. I think there are a lot of strong story elements here and puzzles. There are also some neat images, although playing online on the ifcomp website I didn’t see some of the images, and they were broken. You can still click on them to advance though.

Part of the game is designed to show the horrors of war and for me it was very effective, the way the protagonist just didn’t understand really helped drive home for me how scary it must all be.

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Last Vestiges

This game is an Inform murder mystery by thesleuthacademy, who has written numerous reviews for mysteries on IFDB in the last year or so. It’s nice to see a game by them!

Mysteries are one of my favorite genres of game, so I was interested to see how it plays out here. There are several standard ways to run a mystery in interactive fiction:
1-Have a standard puzzle game that happens to be about murder mystery, with solving the puzzles leading to solving the mystery. This is like Ballyhoo.
2-Modelling evidence and clues in-game, which have to be combined to form a solution. This is how Erstwhile works, and most of my mysteries.
3-Collecting evidence through puzzles and conversation and then having a quiz at the end (where you have to accuse the right person). This is how Toby’s Nose works.
4-Collecting physical evidence and showing it to someone, being able to make an arrest when you have enough evidence.

This game is a mix of 3 and 4. You have to collect enough physical evidence to proceed to a quiz, and then pass the quiz to beat the game.

The storyline is simple. A man was found alone in his room in a pool of blood with no visible wounds. You must examine this single room to discover the clues.

This game boasts a large number of beta testers, which is nice. I struggled with some of the setup, however. Many of the ‘standard responses’ for Inform were not helpful. For instance, there were some ear plugs that I tried to take and it said ‘That is not portable’. Some commands that might have had useful responses didn’t work; for instance, TALK TO didn’t have any message like ‘Conversation in this game is handled by ASKING’ (although that was mentioned in the help system!) and PLAY PIANO had no response.

There are some very helpful responses, though, like SEARCH and LOOK UNDER saying you only need to ‘examine’.

At the quiz at the end, I really struggled with the third question. I guessed it but then decompiled the game to see how I could have gotten there. It seems that the conversation system is a lot larger than I had expected. I had gotten stuck since SHOW (something) TO (someone) often didn’t have a response, so I assumed asking about those things wouldn’t be helpful.

There is one puzzle of a type I haven’t seen before in a parser mystery, involving a grid. I thought that was pretty clever.

Overall, I felt like tightening up some of the standard responses and adding more synonyms and actions like TALK TO and PLAY PIANO would make this an excellent short mystery adventure.

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Thank you for this incredibly kind review! I also thought they were the same guy when I first started my research–imagine how different things would have been if they were.

I agree that the game does reward lawnmowering, and I find your agency framing around choosing not to do that interesting. I know some people have found it tedious–believe it or not, the amount of suggested topics was significantly cut down during testing! I expect to cut it down a little more in a post-comp release.

Your last compliment is also just about the highest I think I’m capable of receiving. Thank you so much.

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Eat the Eldritch

I opened this game and I was poking around and thought, ‘Man, this really feels familiar. Where have I seen this before? Did I test this?’

Then I checked, and I realized that I had played it in the German Grand Prix as Fischstäbchen! I really enjoyed that game, so it was fun to see the translation here (something which has only happened recently since rule changes allowing translations of games).

This is a fairly hefty but manageable parser game about exploring a fishing boat in Point Nemo, the point on earth furthest from land. Things don’t seem quite normal; your crew won’t come out of their rooms and your cook spends a lot of time chanting out of ancient books and being surrounded by freezing mist…

I loved the German version of this game, especially since it had a built-in help menu to list all verbs that you need to finish, something that worked really well for me as a noob. This version seems like slightly different compared to the old one; it has some puzzles I don’t remember, and some features like highlighting of exits, which I like.

On the other hand, seeing it in my native tongue makes it easier to be judgmental. For instance, several times, there were ‘double directions’ like saying something is ‘down’ but you access it to the ‘west’. Even though both ‘down’ and ‘west’ are highlighted, going ‘down’ gives an error. I think it would have worked better to redirect ‘down’ and ‘west’ to work the same way.

The map is pretty intimidating at first. I’d recommend just exploring and mapping the whole thing before anything else as several of the puzzles just involve finding people or things.

I used the hints a couple of times, even for things I did in my last playthrough.

Overall the things I liked last time are still here: the Lovecraftian/dry humour mix and the active and engaging puzzles. I also like the guidance it gives you on some puzzles and the restart method for when you die.

Overall, I think I liked the German version slightly better only because playing in another language presents its own unique challenges and gameplay, but I still enjoyed this one.

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Codename Obscura

There’s a tendency in interactive fiction for people to talk about ‘old fashioned adventures’ or ‘old school’ games , but it means different things to different people, usually ‘similar to games I played as a kid’.

I didn’t really get heavily into IF until I was in my thirties, so I don’t have a ton of feelings for older games. But I do have a couple experiences as a kid; one was trying Zork in my teens and failing to do much of anything (quit at the dam), and the other was playing some obscure text adventures with graphics in 6th grade (one called Hacker and another about rhymes in an Alice in Wonderland type world).

This game really evoked for me the nostalgia of those games, like Hacker. I know other Adventuron games are similar in appearance, but this also really got the feel of games of those time down well. It even reminded me of the feel of games like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.

Anyway, you’re a spy for a secret organization called TURTLE and you’re called in to rescue another spy who is in trouble. Your goal is to infiltrate the enemy’s secret villa and steal back his diamond while stopping his evil plan.

There are a lot of tropes here similar to the 80s and 90s and early bond movies. Some are a bit outdated, but it has a nice overall action vibe. It’s also very Italian (for me the most Italian moment was finding a monastery where the monks wouldn’t let you in without a crucifix). There’s a lot of Italian text in the game. While I’m not fluent, I could understand most of the Italian pretty easily, but it may be useful having google translate nearby (although you can’t copy and paste from Adventuron, last time I checked).

Puzzles were generally fair and well clued, and had fun features like a computer system and a money system. I had to check the walkthrough near the end about three different times.

Overall, I had a great time. Very fun.

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Thank you so much for playing my game (again!) and for your kind review, Brian!

This is still there, but I had to split the help text because of its length. With the command “verbs” you get the list of verbs now. In the manual (“eat me”) there is also more help for specific questions / tasks in the game.

That’s the way it should be! If you can tell me where this happens, I’ll fix it!

Thanks again!

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Hi,

Thank you so much @mathbrush for spending your time with Codename Obscura and writing this expert review!

I’m so thrilled if I have at least to some extent succeeded in creating the vibe of the games of the olden times :wink:

I tried to use Italian language here just as a kind of atmospheric element, so that language skills should not be needed in any way for completing the game. Also, there are transcripts available in the walkthrough, just in case anyone is interested in the language and translation details :wink:

I’m so happy and exited you had fun playing this game. To be honest, I was a bit worried this project would not work as intended, as this is my first ever Adventuron implementation, my first ever IF competition entry, and the version released here also has all the 8-bit version limitations.

5 Likes