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Most Helpful Member Reviews2 of 2 people found the following review helpful: Three short but fun games (not counting the fourth game I made), Wed 28th Apr 2021
By Denk - See all my reviews
OVERVIEW (alphabetical order):
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Illumina:
EDIT: A significantly improved version (4 stars) is available here:
https://www.adrift.co/game/1622
(comp-version comment: A small fantasy adventure with serious bugs but excellent tricky puzzles - 3 stars)
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Quest Giver: 3 stars.
An unfinished but playable concept demo with rough edges but still enjoyable - looking forward to the full game.
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The Garden Party: 4 stars.
Flawlessly implemented "garden labor"-game. Search for missing objects and apply them correctly to solve tasks.
EDIT: A slightly improved version of The Garden Party can be found here:
https://www.adrift.co/game/1621
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REVIEWS (alphabetical order):
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Illumina:
EDIT: A significantly improved 4 stars post-comp version is available here:
https://www.adrift.co/game/1622
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(Competition version reviewed)
Story: You are on a quest to save Princess Illumina and the game starts when you have reached the dungeon in a castle, where the princess is kept in a cell.
This short fantasy adventure has only a few puzzles but they are quite good. They are fair even though one is quite tricky. But if you carefully pay attention to ALL details, you will most likely succeed. I didn't, so I needed a few hints from the author.
This is traditional IF. The main problem with this game (at least the competition version) is, that it has quite a lot of bugs. These could certainly be fixed in an upcoming version so if you don't like bugged games, you better wait for the next version.
One more thing that would improve the game is unnecessary but interesting responses to the most obvious commands. For instance, you start out outside the cell and there is a barred window. You can hear the princess walk around in there, but you can't talk to her. Stuff like that.
So a very polished version would no doubt get at least 4 stars from me. To sum up, worth playing but I recommend waiting for a bug-fixed version for a better experience.
*******
Quest Giver: (3 stars)
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(Competition version reviewed)
This isn't a finished product but more a concept demo. Thus there are a lot of bugs in it, and it also requires some tweaking, etc. Nevertheless, I enjoyed playing it and I would love to play a final polished version.
The game accepts a few standard commands (inventory, Go East, Go North, etc.) but mainly it has special commands and it feels like a mixture of an RPG board game and interactive fiction.
You are the "Quest Giver" and you are deciding which adventurer gets which quests, based on the quest "requirements" (not strict requirements) and the stats of each adventurer. There are 9 stats (Strength, charisma, hunting, etc) which allows for a lot of variation.
Each quest has a little bit of story tied to it, but it doesn't seem to have any impact on the game, so I ended up ignoring it, which is a bit of a shame, as these small stories could have increased the immersion. Perhaps the final version could include a lot more IF elements, e.g. when you talk to the barman, you could get an object to give to an adventurer before a quest etc. In my playthrough, the barman had never anything interesting to say, even though you could ask him about rumors.
Except for the MANY bugs in this concept demo, the gameplay worked well and I enjoyed it.
It would take too long to mention all the bugs, but I have made a transcript with comments which I have sent to the author.
The only "bug" I want to mention is, that in the version I played (the competition version), I ran out of quests after 3 days, even though the game takes 10 days.
If the current content gets a lot more polish, I would probably give the game 4 stars. And if the game was seriously expanded with lots of quest-specific elements, so the narative plays a role, it could end up with 5 stars as the concept has a lot of potential.
If you are open to untraditional text games with board game elements, you will probably like the final product. You may also like the current version if you are prepared to encounter several bugs.
I hope at some point there will be a final version, so people can e-mail their high score for a high score list, the author could have on the game's page on the ADRIFT site. This would make it much more fun than competing with yourself. If there are constantly coming new versions, it is hard to compare scores.
Still, here is my score for the competition version - it will be interesting to hear other people's scores:
(money=378, quests=14, quest points: 110)
TOTAL:.......378+14+110 = 502
*******
The Garden Party: (4 stars)
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EDIT: A slightly improved version can be found here:
https://www.adrift.co/game/1621]https://www.adrift.co/game/1621
This is a short but fun one-room game where you play the role of Clive Custard, partner of Prudence Lavender.
Prudence gives you three tasks (at least to begin with), which should be carried out in your garden. These are:
Getting the firepit lit
Get the waterfall running
Hang the chimes in an appropriate place
The gameplay mainly consists of finding the items you need by examining, looking behind, and looking under (search not needed).
Once you have the items for a certain task, the commands for carrying out the tasks are usually straightforward, as this game has been polished to Lazzah's usual standard with many synonyms and no apparent bugs.
So there are no ingenious puzzles, but still, I found it to be fun to explore the garden, reading the atmospheric descriptions, and looking for the missing objects.
******* |