The last game by Gamer (great name for a game writer by the way) unimpressed me so much I just had to try another. Has he improved since the masterpiece of game writing that was “The Tavern”? Has he managed to write a game that could accurately be described as “not that crap”? Has he – heaven forbid! – written a proper item description? Welllllllllllllll….

The premise of this game is every bit as gripping as the premise of “The Tavern”: it seems an evul man has taken over a house and is planning to end the world. You can tell he’s a nasty piece of work by his refusal to conform to normal spelling conventions and be merely evil. A bad guy who thinks he’s evul is really someone to watch out for.

So… into the house you go to confront the evul man. At one point you're told to press a key or “people will dye”. I hesitated at first, wondering how many people would “dye” if I didn’t press a key. None as it happened. A full five minutes went by without anybody “dyeing”. Reassured by this, I pressed a key, breathed a sigh of relief when no one “dyed”, and proceeded to play the game in earnest.

One room has a clock in it which I am informed is odd. Actually I'm informed it’s odd twice, which goes to show just how odd it really is. This odd clock is, indeed, odd. Despite being of clock size, it’s impossible to take but when the minute hand is examined, you can be shot 1000000 times by a gun. (Which probably explains your inability to take it. 1000000 bullets must weigh a tonne.) Pretty good gun, I have to admit. Even though it shot me, I'm singularly impressed that any manufacturer of weapons can load it with 1000000 bullets. Even more so, I'm impressed that the gun goes ahead and shoots me 1000000 times, despite the fact that the first few shots surely killed me. Still, it’s good of the game to count that I'm shot exactly 1000000 times. Being shot 999999 times just wouldn’t be the same.

However, and here's where the game really starts to shine, if you examine the hour hand of the clock, a frying pan falls out of the ceiling. Haha! This seems to be one of those houses where frying pans aren't stored in the kitchen but in the ceiling which are accessed via manipulating the hands on clocks loaded with 1000000 bullets. Makes sense. Makes perfect sense. Pity it’s an invisible frying pan, though, as even though it falls from the ceiling upon examining the hour hand, it never shows up in the game. Bummer.

As a puzzle, this one is top notch. It’s impossible to figure out beforehand, will kill you if you select the wrong option, which, of course, you can’t possibly reason out, and if you get it right, you're rewarded with absolutely sod all. They sure don’t make puzzles like this anymore.

Remember the comment I made before about item descriptions? Curious to see whether they’ve improved? No? Well, me neither actually but I’ll tell you about them anyway. The fridge is described as “it’s a fridge”. The stove, on the other hand, the author has spent considerably longer on and has fleshed out the description to “it’s a dirty stove!” I have admiration for this lengthier and far more insightful description. Adding the word ‘dirty’ allows me to more accurately picture the stove in my mind, and the exclamation mark on the end just hammers home what a dirty stove it really is. Then again, this is the stove of an evul man, so it makes sense that he’s too busy trying to make people “dye” to worry about keeping his stove clean.

Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to encounter the evul man and save people from a fate worse than “dyeth”. He is, I am informed, behind a locked door, but by the time I reached this stage of the game, my sanity was dangerously close to breaking (this was the second game by the same author I had played in the space of 24 hours), and it was a case of either quit playing right then or suffer some kind of hideous seizure. I might even… gulp… have “dyed”.

Overall, I'm tempted to say it’s not as bad as “The Tavern”, but that’s a bit like saying that a mass murderer with 927 deaths to his name isn't quite as bad as a mass murderer with 928 deaths to his name. On a technical scale of competent game writing, with 1 being an absolute stinker and 10 being the kind of game that’s so amazing you'd cry if you ever managed to get hold of it, this would rank about… minus 5. Maybe minus 6. But definitely not a minus 7.

In terms of sheer crapness, it’s another 5 out of 5 corker.

Doomed! gets worse.

You neglected to mention that "look at clock" or "examine clock" is different from "x clock", and the first two suggest you can break the glass. (You can't.)

The next step is to use the pan on the stove and you'll be teleported. (Actually, you don't need to have the pan; the command will work fine without it ?!?)
Then use the book on the shelf (the left side, or you'll die).
Then use the chip on the computer and you'll be teleported again.
You'll see a rotwiler (poor dog, he's not worthy of being a full Rottweiler) and a bone.
You'll have to "give the bone to rotwiler" (not "give bone to rotwiler").
Go east into the pool. You'll be swimming, but if you drop something, it'll just stay in the room; it won't sink. (?!?)
Go down to underwater where you'll see a rock (with no use). You can stay here as long as you want. (I guess you have gills.)
Go east and take the pistol. (Don't go down, it's a deathtrap.)
(Optionally, go west to a different underwater, where you'll find a key, then go east again.)
Use the teleporter and you'll be back where you found the book.
Go up. You might think to try using the key to unlock the door, but that won't work. Instead, it's "shoot door". (Oddly, the usual Quest "use pistol on door" won't work.)

But aren't you curious as to what colour the evul man will make all these people dye!?

Does an evul man would use green dye - or red?
... oooo, what about a muddy brown.

I disagree.

Pink.

This is scary. Around the time the game was put up, I bought some hair dye. Maybe the evul man made me do it... It was auburn!

elexxorine wrote:This is scary. Around the time the game was put up, I bought some hair dye. Maybe the evul man made me do it... It was auburn!

Poor Gamer... Just remember, they're laughing with you, not at you. Right?

steve the gaming guy wrote:Poor Gamer... Just remember, they're laughing with you, not at you. Right?

Wrong