“The Tavern” by Gamer

davidw
I must have been bored because recently I played an awful game and then, a few days later, I found myself wanting to play another. Now I could have been guaranteed a real stinker by picking one of the Sword Master games, but instead I decided to take a gamble and try a game by a new author. This ran the risk of me stumbling upon a decent game by mistake and being forced to write a review that was positive instead of negative, but I figured my chances were about 90/10 in favour of getting a truly awful game and about 10/90 in favour of getting one that was half playable. As it happened, this game fell firmly into the 90/10 category.

My god, but it’s bad. It’s not quite as bad as the Sword Master game I played recently, but it’s a definite 1 out of 10 stinker on any credible scoring system. Here is an author who at least has a reasonably good grasp of capital letters and knows that it’s generally a good idea to start a sentence with one. He’s not quite as experienced with full stops and putting letters in the correct order to make proper words but I’ll let those minor problems pass for now and move to his real strength: item descriptions. Yes, some games bombard the player with line after line of carefully detailed text, painting in their mind a vivid picture of the item in question in order that they can fully visualise it. Not here. Oh no. Here we are told that the bed “it’s your bed” and the bedside table “it’s a bedside table”. Brilliant! First rate! I can but only wonder at the sheer amount of time and effort that went into creating those masterpiece descriptions. The game weighs in at a hefty 5kb and methinks that as much as 0.5kb was expended on these truly stupendous item descriptions. Maybe 0.6kb.

(Funnily enough, this review weighs in at about 5kb as well which means I wrote about as many words telling you what the game is like as the author did in writing it.)

However, we are also bizarrely asked, upon trying to examine the bookshelf, which bookshelf we mean “the bookshelf or the bookshelf?” A quick perusal of the room indicates only one bookshelf but clearly I'm blind as the game insists there are two. Upon selecting one, my eyesight-challenged player is told “it’s a bedside table”. A bedside table that also functions as a bookshelf? That’s genius! I'm intrigued at the very idea and keep trying to picture it in my mind: is it a bedside table which is effectively nailed to the wall and then books are placed atop it? Or a bookshelf with legs that sits on the floor? The mind just boggles.

Later I try to read a book. I am particularly impressed by the level of spelling and grammar in this scene which tells me “seu rodo nothat desperate” which, if you squint, and if you have severe mental problems and are incapable of reading the English language, almost makes sense. Use of the book impressed me further as there's a puzzle involved here. No, seriously. I'm not joking. It really is a puzzle. It seems you need to throw the book at the door which causes the door to explode as the book is really a bomb! My god! What an inspired idea! Pity I need to USE BOOK ON DOOR to throw the book at the door instead of THROW BOOK AT DOOR but in a game that has been as rigorously tested as this one (I'm guessing upwards of five minutes were spent on the testing process alone) it’s easy to overlook such minor problems.

I should probably also mention that the book is really a super book. Yeah, y’see even after you’ve thrown it at the door and it’s exploded and you’ve been moved to another location, it’s still in your inventory! Well, it’s an exploding book so quite clearly the normal laws of physics don’t apply here.

By this time, I had satisfied my curiosity that this was indeed an awful game. I'm tempted to point out in one long sentence punctuated by commas the sheer number of things that the author had failed to cover – like you can’t open doors, you can’t read books, you can’t open cardboard boxes, you can’t put items on top of items that have surfaces, you can’t knock on doors, you can’t take certain items even though there's nothing stopping you, you can’t lie on the bed, you're told to take the pistol even after you’ve taken it, the first room description is repeated because the author has just tacked his own description onto the end of Quest’s default, it’s not “rumage” it’s “rummage”, there's no bleeding storyline – but that would be just mean, so I’ll finish off by saying that if you're in the mood for an untested piece of tripe that even the game’s author is probably embarrassed about (and if he isn't, he damn well should be), this is the game for you. While it doesn’t reach quite the depths of sheer godawful crapness that the recent Sword Master game did, it’s a worthy addition to the huge array of Quest’s games that can effectively be described as “stinkers, best avoided”.

On the crapness scale, this game is awarded a resounding 5 out of 5.

Thanatos
Another interesting review by David. Bravo. :D

(No Sarcasm)

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