IF Comp 08 reviews
Cry Wolf
by Clare Parker
Well, this is disappointing and unfortunate. Here's a game by a hopeful new author, one with an original premise and some fresh ideas, but I couldn't even finish the first scene of it because it was buggy. The walkthrough shows that the game goes on for a lot longer than what I was able to see, but I could not get any farther than I did.
A wounded wolf appears at your door one night. You, a veterinarian, have the veterinary drugs and medical supplies to tend to her injured paw. I got as far as that, but as soon as I opened the door to let the animal in, a scripted daemon went into an endless looping cycle, printing the same description over and over again. It would print this even if I wandered throughout my house (this game does have that first-author-implements-her-apartment kind of vibe to it) far away from the creature.
I could try to tend to the paw, but the animal would still kill me, because it never quite went to sleep, probably because some variable was not getting set correctly. I could either avoid being in the room with it, which meant the plot didn't continue, or I could try to follow the walkthrough, which meant I got killed eventually, one way or the other, with that cycling description of the animal eating the drugged steak running every single turn. I thought maybe I didn't put enough pills into the steak, but putting one more of them in killed the wolf - a different ending, at least, but another failure to continue past this first scene.
I'm wondering if I started the game from scratch if I would avoid this bug - the author says that she had a friend test it, so presumably it's something of a fluke that I couldn't get past the first scene, but it's also possible she twiddled something between her tester's last runthrough and compiling the version she sent to the competition that introduced this bug. If so, that's very unfortunate, but that can happen.
I'm disappointed, because I wanted to see what happened in this story. Being so buggy as to be completely unwinnable has to rate a 1, even though I really hate doing it.
RATING: 1
by Clare Parker
Well, this is disappointing and unfortunate. Here's a game by a hopeful new author, one with an original premise and some fresh ideas, but I couldn't even finish the first scene of it because it was buggy. The walkthrough shows that the game goes on for a lot longer than what I was able to see, but I could not get any farther than I did.
A wounded wolf appears at your door one night. You, a veterinarian, have the veterinary drugs and medical supplies to tend to her injured paw. I got as far as that, but as soon as I opened the door to let the animal in, a scripted daemon went into an endless looping cycle, printing the same description over and over again. It would print this even if I wandered throughout my house (this game does have that first-author-implements-her-apartment kind of vibe to it) far away from the creature.
I could try to tend to the paw, but the animal would still kill me, because it never quite went to sleep, probably because some variable was not getting set correctly. I could either avoid being in the room with it, which meant the plot didn't continue, or I could try to follow the walkthrough, which meant I got killed eventually, one way or the other, with that cycling description of the animal eating the drugged steak running every single turn. I thought maybe I didn't put enough pills into the steak, but putting one more of them in killed the wolf - a different ending, at least, but another failure to continue past this first scene.
I'm wondering if I started the game from scratch if I would avoid this bug - the author says that she had a friend test it, so presumably it's something of a fluke that I couldn't get past the first scene, but it's also possible she twiddled something between her tester's last runthrough and compiling the version she sent to the competition that introduced this bug. If so, that's very unfortunate, but that can happen.
I'm disappointed, because I wanted to see what happened in this story. Being so buggy as to be completely unwinnable has to rate a 1, even though I really hate doing it.
RATING: 1