Hell Ride by Dana Montgomery
Playtime: 2 hours 21 minutes
This made me want to talk about:
- Buckle up, this is a big game. It’s got several interlocking puzzles, a big map, plenty of locks and keys, and even some red herrings.
- I would say it’s at a moderately hard difficult level, less because any specific puzzle is brain-breaking, and more because the complexity/size of the game means that keeping track of everything you’ve seen and how it might interconnect is challenging.
- Everything has been crafted with a lot of care. Other than one cosmetic issue noted below the final cut, I didn’t come across anything that wasn’t “working” or missing responses. (And there was a cool moment when I was trying to understand the layout of a certain area, and realized that the rooms were numbered as they would appear on the face of a clock.)
- I have the magpie desire to run around collecting things, and that was definitely satisfied. (Bless whoever made my fanny pack, which I think I finally encountered an inventory limit on after pretty much an entire game of shoving things in there.)
- The carnival scenery and theming was enjoyable, most of the things you’d want to do are represented here (ride a ferris wheel, get a tarot reading, eat sugary food, etc.)
- This isn’t really relevant to anything, but after one specific scene I was musing if we are meant to think the narrator’s obscure knowledge has 100% overlap with the player character’s . . . “The Mercury dime is a ten-cent coin struck by the United States Mint from late 1916 to 1945. Designed by Adolph Weinman and also referred to as the Winged Liberty Head dime, it gained its common name because the obverse depiction of a young Liberty, identifiable by her winged Phrygian cap, was confused with the Roman god Mercury. It is 90% silver, 10% copper, and has a weight of 2.50 grams.”
- I was very glad to see that the game ships with a hint system and a walkthrough—I think that’s the better choice when a game has any puzzle elements, since otherwise people who want to finish the game are going to find themselves gated out. Regrettably, several of the places I had trouble actually weren’t covered in the hint system (more thoughts under the first cut).
Notable line:
My one fervent wish:
This is perhaps not a 101-level request, but I think what would really have taken the experience up a notch for me is more cueing the player, especially through error / failure messages. When there’s not a lot of that, then I spend a lot of time not only not being able to do x, but also not being sure if I am having a guess-the-verb problem (and should keep guessing) or if there’s some additional puzzle necessary before it’s possible to x.
a few spoilery examples, spoilers not further marked
- I had a hard time figuring out how to initiate the pitcher’s mound game, trying things like “buy baseball” and “get ball.” The correct command is “give dime to attendant,” but different messages would have helped me realize that my problem was lacking dimes, not phrasing the command.
- I also had a lot of trouble opening the panels to insert the fuses, I think exacerbated by the fact that trying to open the panel gives the default error message “You lack a key that fits Electrical Panel 3,” although the intended solution does not involve a key.
- Based on the blurb and intro the game about writing an article, I expected that at some point I was going to have collected enough material to write an article and leave (maybe by getting back in my car? Since I started in the car?) (and maybe part of the game would be deciding when I had “enough” material?). As things developed and it became clear someone could get killed on the ride, it seemed obvious to add trying to make the ride inoperable to my goals. But I never understood exactly the different “levels” available of collected evidence—the levels refer to arresting people, pressing charges, and getting a conviction, but these aren’t things journalists usually do. Was I supposed to be figuring out how to contact the police? Was there a way to “end” my investigation in-game and I was supposed to be weighing tradeoffs in how early to do that? In the end I think it was just a progress bar, and the police showed up on their own at the appropriate point, but this could have been signposted more.
I realize that this kind of smoothing the rails is time-consuming (and more difficult in a long and complex game!) and not strictly necessary for a functional game, but it’s probably what would have elevated my experience the most.
Overall, a fun fair-themed game with engaging scenery and puzzles, perhaps a bit underclued in aspects
wolfbiter transcript hell ride.txt (432.2 KB)
Gameplay tips / typos
- Not sure why, but invoices started showing up under “show evidence” before anything happened that would make me expect that
- I set images on, but never saw any images. Not sure if an image would help, but I didn’t have any way to figure out that the coupon was for parking.
- In the control room, the following kept happening:
This didn’t seem to prevent me from playing the game, but it did make extracting any information from the control panel fairly annoying.
- Late in the game, my inventory stopped listing how much money I had left