[size=150]The Hangover - By Red conine[/size]
Game’s Blurb:
The Hangover is the story of you. You awake in your apartment with an unknown women and your bank informing you that you changed your name last night. The goal? Get the approval form in triplicate to get the name on your debit card changed!
(Score and review contained within expandable spoiler):
[spoiler]Preconceptions:
I’m starting out without a very positive impression of this one. The blurb’s first sentence is awkward and unnecessary. Waking up in your apartment has become an IF cliché. I awaken with “an unknown women” – an is singular but women is plural, so this is evidently a typo. Why would my bank be calling me about something that only happened last night, and how would they even know? Shouldn’t I be the one to initiate a call to my bank? And in what country is it standard practice for a man to change his name after getting married? Or was it changed for some other reason, and the strange woman in my apartment is just misleading me? Also, I don’t have Adrift 3.9 on this laptop, and I don’t see it on the Adrift downloads page. I guess I’ll try with Gargoyle first.
Review Summary:
Untested, unedited, and in many ways unplayable, The Hangover has some issues with unrecognized commands that are at best extreme guess-the-verb situations, and at worst game-killing flaws.
Played: 10/23/2009 for 1 hour and 10 minutes.
Score: 2 (Broken)
Transcript: here
By now, I’m guessing that every joke about The Hangover has been cracked and every flaw has been criticized in other reviews. Assuming the game isn’t bad intentionally, I suspect the author is very young and very inexperienced. Even the game’s core themes – before it all degenerates into absurdity – show a perplexing lack of understanding about the subject matter involved.
The writing is painful. It could be improved to just “bland” with some work, but as it stands, every apostrophe-less contraction, misspelled word (even the short ones), and formatting or punctuation problem stands out like Sinbad in a bikini.
It also allows players to proceed without vital inventory items, with no way back, and without any justification plot-wise. In my first play-through, upon getting stuck in a padded cell, I thought that was simply the game’s proverbial punch line. The walkthrough said otherwise, but no amount of creative command entry helped me figure out how to give or trade a specific item to a specific person. Of course, I was able to continue (even skipping over a later spot where the walkthrough said I would need that missing item), but I had another “give” problem at the end. I suppose the walkthrough explains the ending, but it would have been nice to see it in-game.
It’s put together with a sort of creative bravado, showing that the author had fun writing it. It’s broken, though, and implemented only at a very basic level where most scenery is absent, room exits sometimes contradict the room text, information is “painted-on” in the room description, and important facts are sometimes missing altogether. It would be easy to call this a “typical” first effort, but it’s well below even that. The Hangover is an unplayable mess.
I’m not one to encourage giving up, though. Advise to the author: Play more IF, read more articles and reviews about this and prior competitions, think like a player even as you’re writing, find testers, and don’t let the first draft be your only draft in your future efforts. You’ll find it far more satisfying when players are able to see and comment on the good points in your game, rather than labeling it a total dud.[/spoiler]