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  Member Reviews - Easter Egg Hunt

And then there's the Easter Egg Hunt, which fell completely flat for me. The game is apparently attempting to preach Christianity or something (a turn-off for me), and does it in a sledgehammer kind of way that is neither persuasive, nor does it ever fully eclipse into parody. I kept expecting maybe there would be some comedic twist at the end, but as I played on I realised I couldn't bear to read however much more was left in order to find out.

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Sat 15th Oct 2011
By Lumin - See all my reviews

At first glance, this game written by a newbie plays exactly like a game written by a newbie, with all the ’my first gaem’ mistakes I’ve seen time and time again when these things pop up on the adventures page. From a gameplay perspective the biggest problem of course were that the descriptions and puzzles were all but non-existent, something that will usually immediately make me quit with the thought that I’d be putting more effort into playing the game than the author did into writing it. But since this was a comp entry I pressed on, and discovered even worse problems with the plot, which apparently started out as an attempt at a classic Christmas folkstory I’ve heard a few versions of, but then devolved pretty much immediately into some of the clumsiest sledgehammer preaching I’ve ever seen, so much that I can’t help but wonder whether the author was for real or not. (I became even more confused a few minutes ago when I looked them up and saw that they’d written ’Igor’ as well, a flawed but still pretty decent game.)

So while I’m not wanting to hurt anyone’s feelings, the only positive thing I can really find to say about this one is in noting the nice sound effects that were added for different rooms, though that kind of attention to a welcome but unnecessary detail while the much more important ’text’ part of the text game was all but ignored is somewhat baffling in itself. In the end, my advice to the author is the same as it always is in these situations: it’s best to play a few games before you attempt to make one of your own, just like a wannabe novelist needs to do plenty of reading before they’re comfortable with writing. Go to Baf’s Guide, pick out some good IF and some bad IF, get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. (And if you’re serious about the Christian fiction thing, try Eric Eve’s All Hope Abandon and Paul Panks’ Jesus of Nazareth...see if you can tell the difference. :-p )