I am not a nice person in the below review! Sorry. Sometimes I get to snark too.
Shew. I was kind of worried, because, so far, every game I have played in the comp that I haven’t liked much, I figured, I personally didn’t like it, but it was probably just not for me, and some other IF enthusiast might like it.
But this one, this ‘zork, buried chaos,’ sucks on toast.
I felt kind of relieved by this: hooray, it’s really quite bad, and, it’s just genuinely bad and it’s not my fault because I don’t get the vision of it! Cooool.
Tons of objects in this game with no purpose and bad implementation. The gray door blocks my way “south” after I just walked south to get through it, because that’s its default description. It’s a “zork” game, but with no xyzzy verb, inexplicably. There’s a “map of the empire,” and when I look at it, the desc says it’s a map of the empire, but it doesn’t show me, the player, anything. As near as I can tell the light is pointless as the game never seemed to check if it was on or not.
And loads of other amusing stuff:
(as part of a room desc)
there’s a glass wall to the north.
>x glass wall
You can’t see any such thing.
>x slide
The small slide is empty.
>down
There’s an obstruction half way down the slide.
>listen
You hear nothing unexpected.
You hear a humming sound from somewhere.
And just general sloppiness. “Souoth.” “It’s a book with loads of symbols on it’s pages.” “get dydnamite.” Wait a minute. That last typo is in the walkthrough. A part of the walkthrough I couldn’t get to because the walkthrough doesn’t seem to work.
Yeah, I actually can’t get through this game because I think the solution in the walkthrough is broken. I also put it in an unwinnable state anyway, I think, by picking up the “keypad,” which, in my defense, was not nailed down. The walkthrough says “get all but keypad” so I figured, what happens if I take that too? Well, I can type the password again and be teleported up to the inscription room again, if I’m holding it.
And then I get:
enscription room
You are in a small room with enscriptions everywhere. There’s a huge hole to the east.>e
A huge hole blocks your path.
…whhhaaaa?
I am blocked by the lack of things.
Then again, maybe it’s supposed to mean a hole in the floor goes down, in front of the door to the east, and I can’t jump over it to go east, but, to make a long story short, ‘down’ doesn’t work either.
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