IFComp2004Reviews

Here are my reviews of the games I played in IFComp 2004:


-=The Great Xavio=-
I like the premise, but it needed some extra beta testing. Pushing the chair on wheels west caused Windows Frotz to take up 96% cpu and it took me several minutes before I was able to kill it. There were plenty of decorations that should have been described but weren't.

Having to work the elevator constantly was a bit of a pain.

It seemed a bit silly that it took me 1:15 to get my first point. It's not that big a deal, but it felt like I wasn't getting much done.

I was annoyed that the game became unwinnable when I walked into 801 and found that I couldn't exit because I didn't have the cart with me.

I liked that there were multiple ways to get light and multiple ways of getting a room key. I would never have thought of asking for a paperclip and I still have no idea about why I had to do what I did at the end.


-=Zero One=-
I got tired of this game after moving around a bit and encountering a bunch of things that I couldn't examine or get without trying a bunch of different names. For instance, typing "get lunchbox" doesn't work despite the fact that that's how it was referred to in the game text. "get lunch box" does work.


-=Square Circle=-
This game has a great ending and a fun puzzle beginning. I thought the middle was a bit too linear, but that may just be me. I like games that aren't too linear.

One thing that hurt this game for me was that I actually figured out the puzzle in the beginning, but I had guess the verb issues and was unable to complete the puzzle without going through the hints.

I also had a guess the verb problem when searching the bushes, but after a bunch of different attempts I finally figured it out.

I really liked how the story actually came together in the end. I was not in fact expecting it to have a story and was actually quite surprised in the beginning that completing the puzzle did not bring me to the end of the game.


-=Gamlet=-
At first I enjoyed the strange dark atmosphere of this game. The author is clearly good with words. However, after a while I started getting annoyed at how nothing was cued. It's normal to expect a person to examine all the significant things in the room description, but in this game you need to examine absolutely every little thing your you'll miss out. You'll enter a room and the room will mention the cupboards and the table and the moonlight glinting off the floor. But, it won't mention any of the objects sitting on the table unless you actually examine the table.

If you type "hint" it will sometimes give you a hint, but other times it won't give any hints. As a result I had to turn to the walkthrough. However, the walkthrough doesn't get you through the game if you just paste it in, so I just gave up on this one.


-=Kurusu City=-
This game has a lot of things in it that made it difficult. It was very easy to get into an unwinnable game and I ended up having to restart the game quite a few times.

However, for some reason I really liked this game. I don't actually know why for certain. The game has some cohesion problems and it actually took me 4 hours to complete, but unlike some games, my opinion of it didn't really change in the last 2 hours, so the score I would give it wouldn't change much. This game really needs to have a hint system though instead of having an external text file.

Part of it was the silliness of some parts of the game. There are only 2 male characters in the entire game and responses to "kiss" are present for every single character. Some of the responses are quite hilarious.

I think the storyline is what I liked best. The main character is sort of a libertarian except she's against robots.


-=Goose, Egg, Badger=-
This is a puzzle game. There is little or no story, but that doesn't mean it's bad. However, there were a few small issues that made things more annoying than necessary. The electricity puzzle was fine the first time, but it was highly annoying to have to revisit every time I wanted to power something else.

I think the concept of having an urge in your inventory is funny and it makes sense in this type of game where you have no real idea what to do next at times unless you examine the urge.

Also, the room descriptions were much too simple, so the world didn't have as much depth as I would have liked.

All in all this game was ok, but it really needs more depth to make it a good game.