I'll start this one by reading the ABOUT, and it turns out the author had this in his mind since the 80's. This plungers me in both fear and excitement: fear, because it is the 80's after all; excitement, because it is the 80's after all.

For the Love of Ornery Blue Yaks, by Doug Jones
As with the preceding entry, I'll start with the conclusions and then go on to the As I Play notes.

All things considered...

A minimal introduction sends you off to explore a minimally described cliché-house that is a portal to a minimally described cliché-forest with cliché-creatures and no story.


[
+] It has a maze. And a forest.

[
-] No context and no strong concept. We start by exploring an old house with very sparse description and many non-important things. Then we enter a wardrobe and off we go to a magical forest with magical creatures, like a Cyclops and a Minotaur. All very un-original. The text is poorly written and formated (some lines juxtapose, some paragraphs should be there and are not, etc.)

So, how bad do I want to play the full game?
Well, I gave up in the intro itself, so you should be able to guess the answer.

And now let's see how the playing went:
[1]
I'm off to discover the mysteries of an abandoned house, which, along with the player, owes very little to the efforts of context or description. It's a house. He is a player. The house has mysteries that some friends told him about. The player looks "about the same as always", only he has a backpack.

[2] Entering the house gives me a "nicely decorated" hallway that has absolutely nothing to look at. It's like a nicely painted blank canvas that has all the art in it, or a white piece of paper which encloses all the letters in the world. The cellar is empty, only cobwebs, but "the cobwebs is not important"; the kitchen has some old food that "is not important"; the living room has sofas and chairs that "is not important". Whatever I do to anything gives me a "is not important" negative reply. Well, last stop: the bedroom. It has a nightstand by the bed. I'll surely want to examine that nightstand:

>X NIGHTSTAND
The nightstand sits by the bed.

Hmm... ok.

[3] The description of the bedroom also tells me that "the only piece of furniture is a big wardrobe", so I'm guessing the bed and the nightstand are in my imagination. I like this sort of concept. It's a Lynchian world, where the object and the idea of the object blend in a world of darkness and confusion.

[4] The Lynchian world proceeds and my head aches! I don't know if this is a bug or a feature, I don't know if the "old school" games wrapped the players in such, so bear with my ignorance if you will. The wardrobe turned out to be a magical entrance to a forest, in which one gets lost. North and then South won't return me to the same location; East and then West and then East again an then West again made me travel through four different places. Well, I like to travel to be honest, I'll be driving in Bosnia this year! Urray! I'll visit Sarajevo and Mostar and I'll also have a swim in the Adriatic sea. Oh, such days never hurry enough, do they? The planes of... oh, the game. Sure. Well, in the last West turn I found myself bloated in the head by a Cylops who wants to cook me and eat me. Speaking of which: I'm off to make myself a sandwich.

[5] Ok, so I stopped playing the game. I killed the Cyclops piercing him in the eye with a hot stick. Then I entered a maze that had a Minotaur which I killed by a random fight: every time I typed "ATTACK", either I would miss or hit, the same for the poor creature. After a few hits, I died. Tried again, died. Third time, Minotaur falls. Urray! I gain nothing with the slaughter and succeed in exiting the maze.
Kills: 2. Context: 0. I give up.
Dbt
11/8/2010 06:23:00 pm

Wait, having a maze is a plus??

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leandro ribeiro
25/8/2010 08:22:20 pm

And a forest! Don't forget the forest!

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