It kinda makes my head hurt.
It’s all ye and yon and stuff.
Hm, I wonder…
>get ye flask
Taketh what?
Dammit! Oh well. Actual probable spoilers below.
I didn’t get all the way through this one in the time alloted, at least not to get what I assume the best ending would be. I suspect actually figuring out how to do so would take longer, though I’m also a little distractable today.
I actually like the general atmosphere of this and the puzzles are forgiving and solvable. I dig that I can ‘win’ at any time for a different ending, and tried this a few times (including as the first command, I confess, though that’s obviously not much of a win).
The in-game hint book isn’t really terribly helpful. It seems to tell me mostly what I need to do, but not how to do it, in situations where the former is obvious and the latter is not.
I took off my headphones because the game talks, in a text-to-speech voice that grates on you pretty fast. I can’t think of any way reading, or even writing, text in this faux-olde-tymy language would actually be fun. I get that it’s meant to be humorous but it kind of isn’t, particularly in the painting room which made my eyes glaze totally over. I get the feeling like the author was going for something here, but the end result is he probably put a ton of potentially annoying effort on his end in to something equally annoying on the user end. The one thing that’s good about the faux-old-English is it makes the game stand out, since the plot of the game, such as it is, might not otherwise.
I did find one outright error where it says something is south but it’s actually east. I like that I can use ‘exits’ to verify this.
There’s a goblin about halfway in who steals from your pouch. There’s probably a way to get my treasure back from the goblin, but I never found it. I just avoided him as much as I could, and hit ‘undo’ any time he stole anything, since this appeared to happen completely at random. Since this works just fine and actually prevents my stuff getting stolen I have to declare the whole goblin thief thing a bit poorly thought-out.
Probably the worst idea in the game is having the gnome riddler ask a trivia question that the average person won’t know the answer to. The in-game hints say to look on Wikipedia, but since the answer as phrased on Wikipedia is a bit confusing I had to do the riddle section five times before I made the right guess. This is doubled in annoying-ness by the fact that it’s the last riddle and you have to re-enter all your answers for the previous riddles beforehand. This is tripled in annoying-ness by the simple fact that… anyone can edit Wikipedia. Yes, I understand that its scientific articles are reasonably accurate due to massive policing, but I might be playing Yon Astounding Castle the one day a troll from 4chan decides to change the answer to “Goku.” You just don’t know.
So, um, bottom-line is a lot of things in this are ill-conceived but it had an OK flow overall and enough content to keep my interest. Most puzzles were reasonably clued. There’s just some stuff I would’ve done differently.
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