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The Challenge

by ViRALiTY

According to the game's competition blurb, the game is a short web-based CYOA/MCA game with 3D graphics illustrations, written and designed in less than 24 hours!

 

Twenty-four hours, eh? Is the author bragging or complaining? Hard to tell. In any case, I played the game with very limited expectations. It turns out that was the best attitude to take, for this game is not a proper game for the IF Comp. Instead, it should have been entered in the IntroComp or released to a few alpha testers for comments because its just a very short glimpse of what a much larger game would look like. However, it's in the contest, and I did play it, so I will review it here. In writing this review, I operated under the assumption that the author entered it into the IF Comp just to receive some review comments and had no expectations beyond that.

 

First of all, this game is a minimalistic graphical adventure that brought back memories of the very early graphical games released by Roberta Williams and company. You see a picture on the screen that is simple 3D drawing of a location, but there is no color and very little texture. It is drawn as if you were standing in the middle of the location and facing in one of the four cardinal directions. There are some hyper-links that allow you to take a limited number of actions such as turn left, walk to table, get knife, stab yourself with the knife, and so forth.

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You start out in a basement and very quickly move so that you can read a message that says the only way out is death. I immediately assumed that the challenge referred to in the game's title is to find a way out that does not involve dying. I started looking around to see what I could do. There is a door to the outside that is locked. There is a stairway leading upwards to a location where you can't do anything. There's table with the aforementioned note and knife, and a sealed crate. That's it. The knife won't unlock the door or open the crate. The upstairs room cannot be exited from. All you can do to end the game is to stab yourself with the knife and die.

 

The game is easy to play, and it moves rapidly along its plot line such as it is. I'll give it that. But the implementation is so minimal that I can't tell if the game has some potential as a nostalgic revisiting of an old format or not. As a modern game for someone to play on a tablet or a phone, I honestly can't say. I think that the author will have to do a lot better job of setting the mood and atmosphere for it to be interesting, but there is just a primitive illustration and no room for text. And, he or she will have to come up with some original puzzles that will fit into this very limited setting, but I don't have a feel for how much he or she can do with this game engine.

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