Felicity Banks

IF Comp: Arram’s Tomb

October 2, 2019 at 2:54 pm (Reviews)

Link to all the games is here.

This looks so perfectly D & D. The cover looks amateurish, but it conveys genre and style perfectly. It is 100% consistent with the writing, which is deliberately cliched.

Heh. It took me five minutes to die on my first go.

Ooh, I think I died even faster on my second go.

On my third try, I lasted SLIGHTLY longer.

This is fundamentally an interactive game, which I know sounds like damning it with faint praise but it’s not I swear! It’s not that easy to make a truly interactive game, and James Beck has done it.

I found the thief creeping on the cleric a bit… well, creepy. But it’s clearly part of his character, and it would only have been truly problematic if he managed to “get” the girl. (It’s possible that he does in some versions, but I’ll give the story the benefit of the doubt and assume that IF they get together it’s because of his positive actions, not because he’s manipulated her into it.)

I have a personal hatred of accents, and I think most readers will find the accent annoying. But I won’t penalise for that.

There were a few minor typos and such, but not enough to penalise.

The formatting was annoying. Most IF engines don’t let you indent paragraphs (like in a novel) so people usually leave a line between paragraphs, exactly like in this blog entry. I think the writer should definitely have done that.

I’m gonna say 3.5 stars for this, because it’s not quite  MY cup of tea but it is well written (deliberate stereotypes and all). If the judging form doesn’t allow half stars, I’ll raise it to 4 stars there.