Thursday, August 20, 2015

Deprivation, by Michael Coorlim

Seeing the size of the TADS file and executable, I thought I was in for a biggie. But not so. There are only three rooms. You've had a bad weekend, the details of which are vague. You also have insomnia.

If this seems like a This Lousy Apartment game, that sort of is and isn't true. It looks like a first effort, and the author seems to have hit at the least inspiring of conventions about this sort of thing, which is a shame, because it just implicitly feels like they know what they're doing when putting actual words together.


I think this could've afforded to be a bit longer than just the one non-puzzle that gets you to the end. So I think the scope was off, and the author could and should have concentrated on, maybe, another night (do you go to work after sleeping? What are the consequences? How messed up is your sleep schedule?) than the more trivial things one finds in a text adventure My Apartment game that are no fun to implement or, for that matter, comb through and realize they don't offer much.

I'm letting this effort skate based on the "ABOUT" section and how it was planned. I like the concept, and too much of the writing on examining etc. was good for this to be an accident. So I have more to say than "pfft, another apartment game." My guess is that the author settled for such a game and probably wished there was a way to do a bit better but didn't find any. Because what's implemented feels good and smooth, but the effort seems to have been focused in the wrong places.

I also might be letting this skate because it's in TADS which always seems to produce a unique flavor of adventures, and I do like the default links you can click on. For instance I very much enjoyed testing Royce Odle's Dead Man's Party and the odd things it does, and I always meant to look at more TADS games. But I never do.

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