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Colossal Cave – Reimagined by Roberta Williams
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not 69 points 🙁
This review was extraordinarily well written and made for a top-to-bottom enjoyable read. This is the kind of game that might have been up my alley as a youngster with enough free time to derive satisfaction from mathing everything out and figuring out the optimal way to beat the game. When I had enough free time that hours of frustration would be redeemed by wandering into that one room just one more time and learning the PUGH spell, and things like that. As an adult who still has time to play and still enjoys being stumped by *good* puzzles, I still have no time for games like this which don’t seem to respect the players time. We should be playing with the game; the game shouldn’t be playing with us.
I’m a huge fan of King’s Quest and most of the Sierra oeuvre, but I don’t revere Roberta Williams as a game designer. Her classics, for the most part, worked because of their atmosphere, graphics, and simple but exceedingly charming stories. The gameplay was never all that great, although fortunately I was too young and captivated by the aforementioned qualities to notice, back in the day.
Glad to see she’s making games again, and I’d gladly try the next one, so long as it isn’t something like this.
Hey all, this is the reviewer just popping back (a whole month later) to note that a recent update of the game fixes a fair number of the gripes I had in my review. I’m no longer experiencing music glitches and there’s a much better “prep screen” where the overall logic of the game is better explained, which details what happens if you do (or don’t) take the instructions at the beginning, amongst a host of other tweaks explained in full on the Steam page.
They’re all solid changes and the game is noticeably better for them. I don’t believe site policy is to update reviews, as it’s much too difficult for our staff to keep on top of playing all the current releases as it is, but if I were to re-review this, you could expect a score a few points higher.