FWIW, I examined the book, it asked if I wanted to read it (Y/N), I typed Y, and it stopped taking any input without letting me read the book. I started over.
I liked the contrast between the rather purple style and the very goofy events. Lots of typos, though.
Story and characters
There isn’t really an overarching plot, just a bunch of amusing misadventures the player character can have. There are very few decisions to make and little logical connection between choices and consequences. A good chuckle.
Implementation
The game is written in a custom engine that abandons many IF conventions such as abbreviated commands, lacks many verbs like “drop”, and says “undefined response” quite a lot. I found it clunky and unpleasant to use. It also doesn’t respect reduced motion, but that’s an easy fix, I’ll open a pull request.
Cute easter eggs: the door’s response to plugh/xyzzy, and the many responses to trying to have sex with various objects.
Puzzles
It’s fine to have a game where the player must make a decision with insufficient information and has little time to act. It’s not the fashion nowadays, but it’s a reasonable design choice. It’s however not fine to do so without any way to save.
One of the most literal cases of a "shaggy dog" story I've seen. I imagine there must be other endings, involving not taking the dog biscuits (and it's not like I knew that was going to be my only decision in the game when I did it), but...there was an awful lot of pressing enter to continue and generally very little using the parser for any sort of decision-making. It felt like there just wasn't anything there.
I'm kind of curious - I've done what I *think* is every ending but have never scored above (I think) 40 points and Apprentice. Are there more endings that I'm missing?
Hiya! There are things you can find/do along the way to get a higher score. Getting directly to an ending won't give you the highest score possible. Thanks for finding all the endings! Hope you enjoyed.
Comments
FWIW, I examined the book, it asked if I wanted to read it (Y/N), I typed Y, and it stopped taking any input without letting me read the book. I started over.
Writing
I liked the contrast between the rather purple style and the very goofy events. Lots of typos, though.
Story and characters
There isn’t really an overarching plot, just a bunch of amusing misadventures the player character can have. There are very few decisions to make and little logical connection between choices and consequences. A good chuckle.
Implementation
The game is written in a custom engine that abandons many IF conventions such as abbreviated commands, lacks many verbs like “drop”, and says “undefined response” quite a lot. I found it clunky and unpleasant to use. It also doesn’t respect reduced motion, but that’s an easy fix, I’ll open a pull request.
Cute easter eggs: the door’s response to plugh/xyzzy, and the many responses to trying to have sex with various objects.
Puzzles
It’s fine to have a game where the player must make a decision with insufficient information and has little time to act. It’s not the fashion nowadays, but it’s a reasonable design choice. It’s however not fine to do so without any way to save.
One of the most literal cases of a "shaggy dog" story I've seen. I imagine there must be other endings, involving not taking the dog biscuits (and it's not like I knew that was going to be my only decision in the game when I did it), but...there was an awful lot of pressing enter to continue and generally very little using the parser for any sort of decision-making. It felt like there just wasn't anything there.
Thanks for the review!
I'm kind of curious - I've done what I *think* is every ending but have never scored above (I think) 40 points and Apprentice. Are there more endings that I'm missing?
Hiya! There are things you can find/do along the way to get a higher score. Getting directly to an ending won't give you the highest score possible. Thanks for finding all the endings! Hope you enjoyed.