Infinite Adventure, by A. Scotts
I think the cat is sufficiently out of the bag that folks realize that this game isn’t a standalone, but rather a companion piece or interactive feelie for And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One (which I’m familiar with, despite the lack of a review so far – I tested it a couple of months ago). In the course of that 1980s-set story, the protagonist winds up playing a game that randomly generates short Scott Adams style adventures; this is that game.
And it does exactly what it says it does! The adventures are simple to the point of minimalism: there’s always an object or character (an altar or a vampire or a idol) that requires exactly one object to be delivered to them (a flower or a kite or another flower – seriously, I ran into a bunch of those even in the half-dozen games I played). You can guess wrong, and get a losing result for that game, but you have to work to do so, since the clues are not at all subtle, and plus the neat in-game map seems to clearly highlight the location of the important object, as well as the place where it must be deposited. The prose, meanwhile, is an accurate mimic of what writing was like in the games being riffed on, which is to say, it’s also stripped down to the minimum level of descriptiveness.
Is this fun? Eh, I could see it being a reasonable way to keep your fingers occupied while binge-watching TV. But I tend to find procedural-generation in story-focused genres pretty underwhelming – I’m aware other folks feel differently, but I like to read to get in touch with the intelligence behind the words, and don’t feel like I’ve got tools for getting in touch with the intelligence behind an intelligence behind the words. Anyway once I grasped the mechanism at work, I didn’t find the game very engaging. There are indications that Infinite Adventure might have some easter eggs or connections to the main game if you delve deeply enough, but since it’s been a while since I played And Then You Come to a House… and I’m not sure I’d recognize the clues. So I think I’ll keep my eyes out for others to surface anything like that rather than doing the digging myself.
Highlight : I got DOSBox to work with no trouble! That felt very satisfying.
Lowlight : Once I figured out that the map marks the locations of everything important, I stopped exploring.
How I failed the author : I left the game running overnight and when I checked it in the morning, the screen was just blinking YOU WIN and didn’t respond to keypresses, and despite my highlight above, I didn’t feel sufficiently motivated to re-mount the game directory in DOSBox to play again.