Spoilers follow the break.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
And it’s another private detective in novel circumstances! Seriously, if this hasn’t been established as a distinct sub-genre already, this Comp alone provides enough instances to do the job.<\/p>\n
The novel circumstances this time around: a minion of Merlin transports you back in time to the court of King Arthur. There are numerous mentions of your previous visit, so I’m assuming that this game is a sequel to another one that I haven’t played. Your job this time around is to protect Guinevere from kidnappers, although you do a miserable job of it and presumably have to rescue her afterward. Why Launcelot isn’t on the job, I don’t know. Rescuing Guinevere from kidnappers was pretty much his thing back in Chretien de Troyes’ day.<\/p>\n
Apart from the opening in your office, the entire game, or as much as I saw of it, takes place on the grounds of Arthur’s castle. There’s some nice magic that works by discoverable rules, and a couple of secret passages, although one of them is confusingly mentioned in a room description before you find it. This may be a symptom of a general problem with things that should be displayed conditionally ignoring their conditions; I noticed a number of things mentioned multiple times in room descriptions as well.<\/p>\n
I wish I could report on just how the whole gumshoe-in-Camelot idea is developed here, but I didn’t really get very far. I found it very hard to even get started on this due to guess-the-conversation-topic problems. When you initially arrive in Merlin’s tower, you’re locked in with no ability to exit until you ask Merlin about “JOB”, and while there is a nudge in that direction in the voluminous output text, it wasn’t nearly strong enough for me. I got past that by means of a walkthrough, only to find similar problems later on. Talking to people about the right keywords is the game’s main challenge, it seems, and it’s not a challenge I much enjoy.<\/p>\n
Incedentally, this is the first game I’ve played in Adrift 5. I don’t know what kind of improvements it has over Adrift 4 for authors, but the one big change I see on the player side is that the automap is now 3D, and can be rotated freely by clicking and dragging.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Spoilers follow the break.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[84,53,507],"class_list":["post-2064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-if","tag-if","tag-ifcomp","tag-ifcomp-2011"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2064"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2064\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4975,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2064\/revisions\/4975"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}