(A bad game that somehow managed to keep me interested. The Bony King of Nowhere - Details (ifdb.org))
Here I come to save the daaayyy!
The Bony King of Nowhere is not a good game. It’s clumsily written, with descriptions that somehow manage to be short and rambling at the same time. The tone shifts unstably between overwrought attempts at humour and heroic fantasy played straight.
The author unevenly shook a big bag of capital letters over the Objects in the game, so they are all capitalised. Except when they’re not. A bunch of apostrophes mutinied and decided to pick all the wrong “itses” to go hang out.
The way the location descriptions are printed is wonky, with one half of the text on top, the automatic object listing in between and another few lines of description underneath.
It took stamina and dedication to power through instead of throwing it aside after the first few rooms.
And yet…
Underneath the clumsy wonky wobbly writing there is actually the scaffolding of a decent fantasy adventure quest.
The map is small and seemingly straightforward, but it has enough twists and turns to make it interesting. Similarly, the puzzles come across as simple, but most have a little hindrance or extra step that gives them the necessary satisfaction value.
There are a number of exciting and entertaining scenes that really liven up the game. (Playing at the inn, most notably…)
And the inclusion of NPC Gerald the Heroic Mouse is a stroke of brilliance.
Oh, if only the author had sent this through a few more rounds of testing, and sat down at the writing desk a while longer…