IFComp 2008: The Lighthouse

Spoilers follow the break.

I don’t have a lot to say about this one. It’s another coding exercise. The whole content is one locked door and one locked container, with keys out in the open. I once caught some flack for saying that a particular game could have been written in AGT without losing anything, even though that wasn’t meant as an insult. This one could have been written in GAGS.

My first reaction on playing it was, however, that it had at least avoided errors. And as we established in an earlier writeup, a game that “manages, by not attempting anything difficult, to avoid doing anything seriously wrong” gets a 3 from me this year.

Then I noticed that in fact the game hadn’t ended when it said it did. It just put up a “You win! ***THE END***” message and let me keep on playing; I could win over and over again if I wanted to by pressing the button to light up the lighthouse repeatedly. Also, you can pick up that button and take it downstairs and it works just as well. It’s not even the only item that shouldn’t be portable but is. This is a pretty impressive number of bugs for such an insubstantial wisp of a game.

Rating: 2, saved from being a 1 only by comparison to the one game I’ve already given a 1 to.

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