In Byzantine Perspective you're a burglar who has broken into a museum. The grand prize is right in front of you, but then the situation turns out to be more complex than what it first seems.

Has David released some new version of his extension that I haven't heard of? Or did the author modify the extension directly instead of with the hooks it provides? Tsk tsk.

The included PDF map is useful and looks pretty. Feelies are always nice and this one is exceptionally well made.

The game is basically a one-puzzle game. Once you've figured out what's going on, getting to the end is just applying that newly-found logic to your actions. I didn't figure it out and went for the hints which basically spoiled the whole game for me. There's no-one else to blame but myself, but I wish there would have been some warning in the hints. So stay clear from the hints as long as you can so that you won't make the same mistake.

For such a short game (took me less than 30 minutes) there's formidable amount of betatesters, which makes it look and feel quite solid. It'll be interesting to see how far this one-trick pony will run in the comp.

I wish, I wish, I wish people would have their games tested. Even a single betatester would have noticed these basic things:

The Grand Quest is identical in structure to last year's The Ngah Angah School of Forbidden Wisdom. You enter one room and get a puzzle in front of you. When you're done with it you go to the next room and solve another puzzle. This continues until you finally reach the end.

The puzzles are a mixture of logic, wordplay and trick questions (like those "How many months in a year have 28 days? All of them have at least 28 days" riddles kids make). There's nothing wrong with this kind of puzzles per se, but I would have preferred to have access to more than one at the same time so when I got stuck I could have worked on some another puzzle and come back later with fresh ideas. Now when I got stuck with a puzzle I had nothing else to do than look at the walkthrough.

The biggest problem is the absence of anything else than the bare minimum needed for a playthrough. Frustration builds up on every "You can't see that here." With some testing and work on the details the game would be a hit with people who like the kind of brainteasers it offers.

Here's my rating table for IFComp 2009. The games are ordered from best to worst by my subjective view and divided into four categories. The list is continuously updated during the voting period as I play more of the games.
Continue reading "IFComp 2009 ratings" →

So, IFComp is underway again. I've set up this blog for reviews and maybe for other IF stuff I might come up with later on.

Initial impressions from the blurbs:

A new game by Eric Eve should be good as always. I'm expecting it to reach the top 3. Other works that look interesting are Broken Legs, The Hangover, The Duel in the Snow, Eruption, The Believable Adventures of an Invisible Man and Rover's Day Out. Some for which I'm having serious doubts already are zork, buried chaos (exclamation marks and no capitals are suspicious) and Yon Astounding Castle! of some sort (ye faux olde Englishe nay bode well, even though it can be done well) but these are fortunately the only two that jump out, and of course I might be mistaken about them.

Seems to be a lot of traditional cave exploring and treasure hunting this year. Two games start with the player character having a hangover. Three with the word "quest" in the title. Two CYOAs and the other has the only homebrewn parser. No TADS games.

There are a lot of similar themes and names. This is the longest chain of names could find: The Grand Quest → Spelunker's Quest → Snowquest → The Duel in the Snow → The Duel that Spanned the Ages.

Coming up: A rating table and the reviews.