![]() Overall, it had a gritty/depressing vibe to me. Before that, I'd say that this game has a lot of disturbing content of various sorts: ( Spoiler - click to show) occasional extreme profanity, slurs spoken by people presented as villains, torture, execution, and affairs. I'll spoiler much of the rest of the discussion below to various levels of detail. There are only a few choices to make that get transmitted the bulk are not. Each of the two stories takes well over an hour to read through. In the first place, it is a substantial chunk of text. ![]() Those games featured a few pages or so of text interspersed by choices which were then communicated to the 'other player' via passing of codes (in the first game) or a server (in the second game mentioned). The author of this game entered the first two-player IFComp game a year ago (The Last Night of Alexisgrad) which inspired at least one other multiplayer IF game (Ma Tiger's Terrible Trip) by another author. An author with a similar feel is Garry Francis, for those looking for even more. This game is best enjoyed by enthusiasts of text adventures that prefer the pixel art/command line look, like puzzles over story, and want something long and tricky but fair to digest. In a room described as having many books, X BOOKS said it didn't understand, while X BOOK said 'you don't see the small book', an object I had yet to encounter. For instance, 'STAND ON LADDER' or 'STEP ON LADDER' didn't work, but 'CLIMB LADDER' did. I played around for 10 minutes or so then went to the walkthrough, as I knew from experience that this game would be hard to finish in two hours without doing so. The author has a type of game he enjoys making, and I appreciate the consistency. The idiosyncrasies remain the same as well, such as objects in containers not being 'in scope', so you can't examine or take things in an open container directly, instead requiring the command TAKE ALL FROM _. Each of these games is written in qBasic by the same system and features a large building that contains different areas containing diverse historical or other themes, often accessed through portals, minimal descriptions of areas, potions or elixirs, riddles and codes, and multicolored devices. The games by this author seem to fall in the latter category. Another style is to keep making exactly what you like, making games that are all alike, consistent with each other. One way I've seen is to experiment with different styles in an attempt to find what players like, and respond to feedback by making big changes in future games. I'm sure there's tons more content, but for now I've seen enough for a (positive) review. I died (or won?) by repeatedly ignoring directions in a cool Fallen London style (specifically by ( Spoiler - click to show) returning to a tower every night when told not to). I ended with a score of 150, mostly made from Recording my secrets (as mentioned in the manual). Polish-wise there are occasional typos, once there was a popup error when starting a new character (something like ( Spoiler - click to show) first dreamer has been removed), and there was a reoccurring bug where exits were listed that didn't actually exist (possibly if you try a wrong direction the game includes it in the list of exits? I'm not sure). Getting injured in some way is very common. ![]() You can do pretty well without either, though, at least for a while. Very few locations sell both or either, and usually you can only do one action at a port. The game has you start with goods and food, and it's really hard to consistently replenish these. Where it's worse for me is in difficulty and polish. The setting is compelling, and there are many approaches to the game and customization of the character. Procedural generation here has dramatic effects on the story, and includes nice chunks of unique content. What this game does well is replayability and freshness. Some choices are always available to type, like STATUS. ![]() You generally pick choices by typing capitalized words or selecting from a menu by typing a number. You are a dreamer exploring a vast ocean of procedurally generated towns and cities. This game is a fantasy version of that (kind of like how Agnieszka Trzaska first made 4x4 Galaxy then 4x4 Archipelago). I really enjoyed the game myself it was procedurally generated, bouncing from planet to planet trying to complete various success criteria. This author's game Skybreak! is one of the most popular games from 2019, even getting nominated for a Best Game XYZZY Award.
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