This is a review of Recess at Last by Gerald Aungst, a glulx game entered in the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition. Spoilers below.
Here are some other reviews of this game:
Emily Short
Victor Gijsbers
Aric Maddux
Gemma Bristow
Michael Martin
Wesley Osam (includes other reviews)
Nitku
Sarah Morayati
Merk
Imrihamun
Carl Muckenhoupt
Lucy (includes other reviews)
Dan Shiovitz
Jake Wildstrom (includes other reviews)
Christos Dimitrakakis
…
I got to the end of this game and thought, “Well, geez, it’s already over. There were a bunch of rooms I never even got to. Did I miss something?” I discovered – partially by looking at the walkthrough – that there are multiple paths to victory, which is impressive. And some extra stuff, if the author’s blurb is to be believed.
So I beat the game, like I said, and the promise of multiple puzzle solutions and goodies just… doesn’t make me want to open up the file again. I feel bad for that, since the game itself is pretty smooth – there are one or two phrasings that weren’t recognized, but they were oddball choices – the game is surprisingly detailed and responded really nicely for me.
Maybe part of it is just that there’s no real problems to overcome, no drama, no attachment to PC problems. I never really cared about my shoes as a kid, maybe that was part of it. I didn’t bring my own nostalgia to the table. The odd thing was that the setting is nicely detailed, I could easily think of my old elementary school as I wandered around. That doesn’t mean I was interested in it as a story.
This is great work… but not interesting enough to grab me. Maybe it’s just too true-to-life, it’s too mundane to really suck me in. It’s a slice-of-life for a kid and not much else.
Technical: Pretty darn good, considering a lot of what the player needs to do. NPCs responded reasonably, using the book and assignment (I went the route of just redoing the homework) rarely encountered a problem. I think the game would have benefited from some oddball response brush-offs, like I tried ‘write’ and ‘do assignment’ and got ambiguous answers. As if the game has a lot of stuff partially implemented, but not enough to understand me.
Writing: Oddly straightforward. I was expecting much of it to be from the kid’s perspective, but it’s relatively grown-up, concentrating on details that someone in a fit of nostalgia would concentrate on. It’s not BAD, it’s just one of the things that caused me to kind of shrug and move on.
Fun: I don’t think I needed the walkthrough (which is good, since it only considers one path) but it is pretty short. I played through easily, but it’s hard to call it really fun, since I wasn’t grabbed.
Do I hope that the author writes more IF? Well, I hope he’s listening, and not put off. This was really nice work and a good choice of setting… it just didn’t get its hooks into me. And I would LIKE it to, it’s a really worthwhile idea and the author is obviously competent enough to work more with it.
