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A couple of games not rated or stopped playing after a while.

Yon Astounding Castle! of some sort by Tiberius Thingamus

Even though the puzzles and gameplay here weren’t that bad, after a while I just couldn’t go on because reading ye fauxe olde Englishe became too taxing. Thy Dungeonman did it well; Yon Astounding Castle overdid it.

Broken Legs by Sarah Morayati

Broken Legs presented an interesting dilemma. On the other hand, I did not personally enjoy the game very much. In essence it’s an optimizing game: play, replay, do something different, see how the situation improves a tiny bit, replay, continue until you have the exact, complex solution. I don’t care for this kind of games at all. It didn’t help that Broken Legs had such a repulsive main character.

Then again it wouldn’t feel right rating it purely based on personal enjoyment because it is polished, deep, and clever piece of work. The score that it objectively deserves is much higher than what the subjective score in my case would be. So finally after thinking about it for some time I decided to take the easy way out and just not rate it at all.

The Hangover by Red conine

The ADRIFT runner said that I had the wrong version and would have had to update the story file with some tool. Reading other people’s reviews didn’t exactly make me want to jump through hoops to get the game running so The Hangover will officially be the only game in this comp that I didn’t play.

The author of Eruption spends quite a lot of words explaining his motivations to enter the comp. Apparently he figures that either there is the usual amount of crap submitted so that his game places somewhere in the middle, or there are a lot of good games so his game places at the bottom. While some amount of realism is healthy, you can’t help but wonder if the game would have reached higher if the aim hadn’t been so low.

The gameplay consists of object hunting in a tropical island (for some reason at first I assumed it was the Pompeii and expected Roman soldiers and pilums and stuff). It’s pretty straightforward with little plot, but at least there’s a background and even a feelie, so it’s not completely bland.

I had troubles figuring out what the exits were at many of the locations. I think this is because there were too many directions mentioned in the descriptions so I had to really read and understand what they meant. For example, see what happens if I highlight all the directions in this room description:

That’s a lot of directions in one paragraph (plus a mention that up is also a direction) and it’s very difficult to pick them out from there. In addition the map is full of one-way paths and paths that change direction (so if you go west, then east, you don’t end up where you started), so the topography is much more complicated than it should be considering how relatively few locations it has.

There was one puzzle I struggled with because I completely misunderstood an item’s description (you would think that if you lug around a cloth that has a pair of oars wrapped in it you would notice that there’s something inside the cloth). Otherwise it was quite straightforward and easy — not complete crap, but not exactly shining either. Just like the author intended.