The Party Line (minimalist puzzlebox hybrid game)

[robinjohnson]

I’ve released a minimalist puzzle parser/choice hybrid game, “The Party Line”, which is my submission to the AdventureX Jam (which happened this year instead of the AdventureX conference.)

Play here: http://versificator.itch.io/the-party-line

(Sadly you cannot get this game as part of my current $5 sale, which ends tomorrow, but it’s free to play and you can donate if you’re feeling particularly awesome.)

Also, as a jam game it’s not had as much testing as I’d usually do before release, so if you hit any bugs, I’d appreciate hearing about them.

Share and Enjoy!

[nilsf (Nils Fagerburg)]

That was really fun.

A few comments (hidden for spoilers)

Difficulty-wise it felt mostly in the (IMO) sweet spot but I did end up cheating (source diving) to find the solution for the popcorn puzzle. Perhaps it could use a bit more hinting (though in retrospect the solution seems quite fair so maybe not).

Perhaps adding a message for the old man after you lift the curse would be nice.

I found the inventory limit rather annoying and didn’t see the point since it didn’t seem to be in the service of any of the puzzles.

I ran into a few minor bugs (I’m running Firefox if that matters):

• the boombox played “undefined” instead of song titles

• exiting the ballroom after disintegrating everybody still gives a message about the dancing crowd.

> north

OK

A man in a cricket jersey jostles against you.

The boombox plays “undefined”.

The guests crumble away to dust.

The band vanish.

The boombox stops playing and disappears.

> south

You manage to find your way through the dancing crowd.

OK

• when trying to solve the popcorn puzzle I brought all the objects I could find into the cinema room, as a result the room description frame was quite large and the inventory frame was pushed off the bottom of the screen and couldn’t be accessed (not sure how to fix this though, maybe list items in two columns if there are more than N items )

• the “drink” verb wasn’t removed after drinking from the popcorn bucket so you could continue drinking from the now empty bucket (and perhaps more seriously it might misleadingly give the impression that the bucket is still full).

• after restarting the game after winning the transcript text is under the room description (this doesn’t seem to happen when you restart during the game):
  

  

Overall though it was lots of fun

[robinjohnson]

Thank you! I’m glad you enjoyed it.

I believe I’ve fixed all the issues you mentioned, except the weird display one at the end, which I don’t see on Chrome. (I briefly broke the whole thing while I tried a quick fix for it, so I took that out again.) You may or may not need to restart your game to see the fixes.

As to the inventory limit - I’m glad you mentioned it, because it was a bit of an experiment. I’ll leave it in this one, but I probably won’t put it in any of my games again. There are puzzles that are solved just by carrying the right object at the right time, so I didn’t want the player solving them by accident just because they’re always carrying everything they’ve come across that wasn’t glued down. But the answer to that is creative puzzle design, I suppose, and use of the “holding” mechanism which I already put in to address that.