Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Holy Roman Empire, by Ralph Gide

Hi Ralph. Your pseudonym was 10th in my top-9 poll. No name rec for you! Well, you wrote a fun game, so that's consolation.

This game plays on if people worshiped numbers instead of religion. It's a pretty grim world, and the satire generally works except for the room names grating on me a bit. I like "mathedral" as a portmanteau but I think the author was showing off a bit and didn't need to. Or maybe, being a math person myself, I wish the author had used more mathy terms to show off with!

Other than that the game is pretty smooth, and I liked how you had to skirt the crowd--perhaps trading with the hermit could be cleaned up--and getting the prayer helmet was clued well too. What to do with the bowling ball was an odd bit of slapstick I kind of brute forced, but it was the end of an inventory juggling puzzle I overall enjoyed. I guess I'm sometimes tough on things that I feel should work even better.

The game also mentions ways to get killed in ABOUT, which I looked for but didn't find. Well, except for the blatantly stupid act of attacking the Pope. It would be fun to retry to find them. Apparently there's a ClubFloyd transcript already up.

I recommend you play the musical instrument both ways, for fun.

Also, spoilers of my riffs on what you get when you win, below:


I forget if you need adverbs or just verbs?

"I don't like Twine's interface," said Tom promptly."I didn't use natural language til I was 7," Tom remarked informally.
"This text adventure needs to implement more stuff," Tom objected.
"Seven NPCs leaves this room too crowded," Tom ruminated.

And, the biggest reach:
"Getting around in parser games is stupid," said Tom uncompassionately.

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