Main game
3.36 average rating based on 25 ratings
Play: 8/10 I can't deny I wound up quite addicted to this once I broke down and used a guide. This thing's tough, if like me, you are a completionist. I'm not a big fan of text adventures at this point, but I may grow to love them. This is the closest I've gotten to loving a text adventure so far (mind you, I'm going chronologically for games, so there's not much competition yet, heh). But in the end, the frustration of the RNG (perhaps only due to the way I can access the game) and the recurrent dwarves/pirates made me not go through with my completionist goal. Maybe someday. Hot tip: ALWAYS type "get axe" right after you throw axe, no matter the situation
Feel: 9/10 Again, I got quite sucked into the game for a while, as I got to know the map and remember room descriptions like the misty room, swiss cheese room, the fissure room, etc.... the Y2 room, commands like plugh plover etc, and things I only knew thanks to guides (like the slab, pit, bedquilt commands at least for the 350-point version I played). Though the frustrations won out over the fun of the …
Play: 8/10 I can't deny I wound up quite addicted to this once I broke down and used a guide. This thing's tough, if like me, you are a completionist. I'm not a big fan of text adventures at this point, but I may grow to love them. This is the closest I've gotten to loving a text adventure so far (mind you, I'm going chronologically for games, so there's not much competition yet, heh). But in the end, the frustration of the RNG (perhaps only due to the way I can access the game) and the recurrent dwarves/pirates made me not go through with my completionist goal. Maybe someday. Hot tip: ALWAYS type "get axe" right after you throw axe, no matter the situation
Feel: 9/10 Again, I got quite sucked into the game for a while, as I got to know the map and remember room descriptions like the misty room, swiss cheese room, the fissure room, etc.... the Y2 room, commands like plugh plover etc, and things I only knew thanks to guides (like the slab, pit, bedquilt commands at least for the 350-point version I played). Though the frustrations won out over the fun of the game, I dunno, the fact I already have such an attachment and urge with this game to go for completionism (not to mention, altogether rare for its time... and the difficulty to do so...) bumped it up to an 8. I liked the humor, I loved the descriptions, and honestly this game could grow on me over time as I have more perspective on the genre and derivative works. I once went on a field trip to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, and yeah, to discover this game was inspired by its mapping. And then I read up on Stephen Bishop. Wow. Love it
Attachment: 9/10 I probly will be replaying this in the future to see if I can get better RNG or find a better way to play the game than a browser app heh. The fact that I still have the urge to replay the game right now, and most likely in the future, because I want that completionist goal says a lot. After playing more text adventures, and understanding this game's influence, this decidedly is a game I will return to.
Obviously it’s an incredible milestone that influenced all adventure games until at least the mid-Eighties. Today it’s a very limited game but it still is fascinating in the setup, in certain descriptions, in how some puzzles are bizarrely constructed and in all the “oh so meta” conclusive part. I played the emulated version available on the Windows Store, which is not the very first one, but it’s fine. It feels at the same time like a game from the Seventies, a game from the Eighties and in certain aspects a game frome decades later.
as frustrating as this game is, after reading about its connections to mammoth cave in kentucky, which I have been to, and about stephen bishop's relation to the cave and its mapping, this, this game is great. yea, text adventures are a liked genre now. yay the chronology experiment strikes again
https://www.ifiction.org/games/index.php?cat=1 i wish i had known about this website before jumping into these early text adventure games!