by Stuart Campbell, Simon Reid
This is a sloppy text adventure literally littered with bugs, and another one with the No Need To Examine syndrome [an insolent "Why? I've told you everything there is to see" is the only answer you get], it contains hundreds of sudden death conveying the concept Die and Learn for your next reincarnation, descriptions are dry and short. But I'm playing it quite a lot, in the last two days or so. So, a sloppy adventure can be fun. A sloppy adventure can be good. Sloppily good. This is another one of those Nuclear Fear games. I've already reviewed Artic's Ground Zero, and I've listed I Will Survive! [not reviewed yet, although I already played it last year, and liked it], but I missed this one, which seems, after all, particulary obscure - no reviews, no adverts, no solutions, no tips, unknown original price and only one vote from WoS users: a neat 5. So, as in the other two, you start in your house while mass hysteria is taking over people's self control outside. From the beginning you have a sense of roughness and approximation. The text appears letter by letter, which takes some time, annoyingly. You can't watch the tv. Your home is three rooms, and there's almost nothing interesting in them [vastly better homes in GZ and IWS!], and, by the way, you don't even have a bedroom? Not mentioning the lack of a bathroom. Those must have been really hard times.
And very soon you encounter your first bunch of Die and Learn sudden deaths.
And what about the bugs? Type an unrecognized one-letter command, and the game WILL FREEZE. And the only valid are the four main cardinal points, apparently. Sometimes the game seems to do just whatever it fancies to do in that specific moment. It attributes you trenchcoats that you never had. A guard that went away is still in the description. And lots of other marvellous examples of attention to details. Nonetheless, suprisingly, I've found myself playing it longer than expected. I like the topic, of course. But you start finding items, and solve little puzzles, and discover interesting bits, so you keep going, because after all and in spite of all is not that unpleasant, it seems. Sometimes the game becomes unexpectedly loquacious. Especially describing your new shining sudden death, and there are a really good number of them, and of all types too. Even some humorous touches start to emerge. And the map is not so absolutely meager as initially thought. It's a bad adventure for bad adventurers: it fits me like a glove. So it's a totally undeserved 4/5.
