Review scoopings 3/5 · Mar 8, 2023
Finally A Mid-80s Text Adventure That Has The Inimitable Feel--And Frustrations--Of 70s Adventures
Preliminary: Gosh these people have a lot of crises! I love the use of sound when you check the status screen. I love the Look/format/UI for the text adventure, and I like that you have so many settings (early PC text adventures definitely seem to look and run better than Speccy/C64 ones imo) 
Play: 7/10 Lmao the Pee mechanic, kinda …
Preliminary: Gosh these people have a lot of crises! I love the use of sound when you check the status screen. I love the Look/format/UI for the text adventure, and I like that you have so many settings (early PC text adventures definitely seem to look and run better than Speccy/C64 ones imo)
Play: 7/10 Lmao the Pee mechanic, kinda silly but oddly well-done and I love that you can do it anywhere :-p I like that the text is descriptive and truly tells a story/adventure without getting all verbose and wordy. The parser could be improved a bit
Feel: 8/10 Even tho I of course don't have access to the actual original images, that was a cool idea to include them for clues (and of course, scans are available online). As always I love love love that there are no petty rng-based deaths. Lol neolithic aliens, nice. And ahhhh, how satisfying: finally another true text adventure (hell, this kept my interest more than many of the graphic text adventures I've been playing and even the action/arcade-adventures... ironically I was tiring of text adventures and anxious for action-adventures, now the tables have turned a bit as I finish up 1985 games :-p ), and best of all, a treasure room type mechanic! Ahhhh, reminding me of my favorite era of text adventures in the late 70s! How I miss first exploring the ascent of text adventure culture... Unlike those super early text adventures tho, and indeed many of the 80s text adventures I've tried so far, this game's illogical/absurd puzzles aren't so nasty: at least they give some hint, albeit often tacky like the SWEES puzzle (not a spoiler to mention it heh). Reminds me, of course, of Colossal Cave but where you can actually find a hint somewhere, instead of just pure trial and error. Indeed, even the first Zelda, released a year later, wasn't always so logical about revealing hints for its secrets (tho many do have hints somewhere in the game).
Attachment: 8/10 As much as I was enjoying the game, when I died for the 3rd time because it wasn't clear whether my Luminator was on or not (it started simply telling me Click instead of whether it was on or off, even if I tried looking examining etc), I decided I'd give up. This was a great text adventure tho! And the fact I tried it 3 times, and the fact I still kinda wanna try it again and use save, means a lot. Since I was playing it on browser I couldn't save this time, but maybe in the future. I'm super sleepy and might be getting sick grrr and regretted not streaming Abe's Oddysee tonight, so I'm surprised I was able to enjoy any game, let alone a text adventure! Glad I tried it.
Completion: Got most the Treasure Items, soon past the Neolithic Aliens part Playtime: ~40 mins