GAMES & AUTHORS: Escape From The House by CJ592; Nami Adventure by Matthew Jessup; Something 'Bout A Hex by Paul Flum Games; Where's Annabel? by CJ592
PLATFORM: Quest http://www.axeuk.com/index.htm
SOUND: no
GRAPHICS: no
REVIEWED: 9th February 2007
WALKTHROUGH: n/a
DOWNLOAD: http://www.textadventures.co.uk/

Quest 4 recently came out so when I saw a number of new games had been uploaded to the main site, I decided to try them out and see what the new version had to offer. Unfortunately, two of the games are written with the previous version of Quest so whatever jazzy new features version 4 brings with it won't matter much to them. Oh well, I'd downloaded them so figured I might as well give them a bash and see what was what…

The first one I tried was Escape From The House which gave the indication from the very start of being just as bad as every other Quest game that I'd played. The introduction was:

You need to find a way out of this house

Hardly inspires you to play any further, does it? From there it went from bad to worse. The first location description is littered with spelling mistakes, grammatical errors and weird capitalisation. At the end of it, I'm advised

There exit Norh take you to the Small Hall

And this is at the very start of the game where people are most likely to quit if they don't see anything very favourable! Now I can understand being new to the scene and not really knowing what things are standard as far as text adventures are concerned, but even the newest newbie of them all should realise that terrible spelling at the very start of their game doesn't give a good first impression.

Playing a little further, I noticed Escape From The House suffered from the usual array of faults which seem to blight almost every Quest game I've ever played. There's a desk with a drawer in it, but the OPEN command isn't recognised; another location has a lavish table that can't be referred to as TABLE or LAVISH TABLE but only as DINING TABLE; many items mentioned in room descriptions can't be examined and those that can have short, uninspiring descriptions often littered with spelling mistakes; there are items that should be readable but the READ command isn't understood… (1 out of 10)

I went on to another game by the same author - Where's Annabel? - not really expecting much and, yes, not really getting much either.

This one had an introduction at least, though the author's spelling and grammar haven't improved much since Escape From The House. Nor has his ability to know where capitals are and are not needed. And he's still a long, long way from writing something even vaguely playable…

Quest has the strange habit of displaying the items (both ones you can pick up and immovable ones) in bold type before the main body of the text in the room description, which is a bad idea to say the least and compounded here by the author then going on to repeat most of what you have already been told. So the first room description reads:

You are in the main Garden.
There is a closed Well, some Yellow Flowers, some White Flowers, some Red Flowers and some Blue Flowers here.
You can go west.
You are standing in a small garden. There is a large well here and it is overgrown with colourful flowers

As I've already been told there's a well and some flowers here, is it really necessary to incorporate them into the room description as well?

What age the game is in set I couldn't say. At one time you are given gold coins, which led me to assume it was way back in the Dark Ages, but at the same time you're given a photograph so it's clearly not a medieval game. Unfortunately the author doesn't seem willing to elaborate on things. Then again, little about the game is clear. For a start: who is the player? The background to the game is that someone called Annabel has gone missing (this is detailed in the remarkably clumsy introduction) and you have to find her, yet whether you're a police officer, a freelance detective or something else altogether is never indicated. Part of me suspects even the author doesn't know.

I didn't last long with Where's Annabel? Mainly because it was just so bad I was on the verge of quitting before I'd even finished reading the introduction, but also because of the remarkably small amount of commands it understands and the frequent bugs. Not to mention some of the worst guess the verb problems I've ever come across. A good example of this would be:

You're given a photograph of Annabel. Now with a photograph, the logical thing to do would be to SHOW it to people, right? Ah, but the game doesn't understand the SHOW command. It does understand GIVE funnily enough but won't let me give it away because I need to keep hold of it. USE PHOTOGRAPH when speaking to an NPC called Baggie produces an unhelpful message that I can't use it here. At this I got stumped and started typing in silly things just to see if I could hit upon the solution by sheer luck. And I did. The command required?

USE PHOTOGRAPH ON BAGGIE

Ah, of course. What an amazingly obvious command. USE PHOTOGRAPH ON BAGGIE is so much better than SHOW PHOTOGRAPH.

Okay, enough with the sarcasm and enough with the game. Avoid this one like the stinker it is. (1 out of 10)

So onto the next one - Nami Adventure - one of the first ever games written with Quest 4. As this was a brand new text adventure system, I wasn't really sure what to expect other than it being an improved version of the old Quest. Improved? Well, in theory…

At first glance, the interface appears the same as the old version. The side panels are still in place (although why they're even there in the first place beats me as they add absolutely nothing to any of the Quest games I've played), the text entry line is still minimal and… that's about it. Whatever other changes have taken place aren't immediately apparent, with the only obvious difference being that some of the buttons now have a nicer box around them than before.

As for the game…

Oh dear god.

For some reason that probably seemed like a good idea to the writer, but sure doesn't to this poor player, the game clears the screen after every single command. Yes, every single one. So if you examine an item, the screen clears. If you try to open something, the screen clears. In fact, even if you make a typo, the screen clears just to tell you it doesn't understand what you mean. Now while I quite like screen clearing for moving between locations - it keeps the interface looking nice and tidy - for every command it's just the worst idea possible. Seriously. By the time I quit the game, and it wasn't long believe me, over half the commands I'd typed were LOOK just so I could see where I was.

Unfortunately, this made playing the game a real chore. Location descriptions are as painfully brief as they generally are in Quest games, usually a line or two at most, and Quest has still got the peculiar habit of preceding room descriptions with a list of the items that you can see in bold type. Funnily enough, one of these items is the player character, though why the writer felt the need to list the PC as one of the items in the room is beyond me.

What bit I played of the game didn't impress me one bit. Yet again, it seemed to be a Quest game written by someone without a clue what they were doing, hadn't been tested, didn't have any clear storyline and, burdened by the screen clearing after every command, was just more trouble than it was worth. (1 out of 10)

I then moved on to the final game, Something 'Bout A Hex, which certainly had a better blurb than the previous games but which crashed with an error message whenever I tried to play it. After some experimentation, it seems that this is another Quest 4 game but the error message never indicated this and so I'd blindly assumed it was still the older version. But I fired it up in the new Quest 4 and tried it. Hey presto! It worked!

To begin with, it didn't seem too bad. The first location had an actual honest to god description which was more than a few lines long. It even listed a huge array of items. Wa-hey! Something to examine, I thought. Unfortunately not… as while there might be items listed in the room description, the writer hasn't bothered providing descriptions for any that I could find. A sample from my transcript went:

> X MANTLE
I CAN'T SEE THAT HERE.

> X PISTON
I CAN'T SEE THAT HERE.

> X FISHTANK
I CAN'T SEE THAT HERE.

> X FIREPLACE
I CAN'T SEE THAT HERE.

> X DRIED ROSE
I CAN'T SEE THAT HERE.

Etc…

If one of those had been missed, I'd probably just chalk it down to simple carelessness and leave it at that. If two had been missed, I'd wonder if the writer needed to get himself a better set of testers. But with all of them missed… well, if this game even knows what a tester looks like, I'd be very surprised.

(As a side note, Quest now has a transcript command. I figured this out pretty much hit and miss as it doesn't detail it anywhere in the game and the WHAT'S NEW section under the HELP options button doesn't work. On the down side, the transcript is a remarkably poor one as it doesn't display any of the text generated by your commands, only the commands themselves, rendering its use as a transcript tool pretty much non-existent. You also don't receive any confirmation when starting or stopping a transcript and no indication of where the file has been saved. You're not even able to name the transcript which is another failing.)

Leaving the first location presented me with a slight problem: namely that I couldn't return. The exit had, apparently, gone missing. Other locations presented other problems. One had a door which couldn't be opened as the OPEN command wasn't recognised (up to version 4 and Quest still doesn't understand many of the basic IF commands that every other system has had for years); another had a desk which I needed to GO TO DESK before I could do anything with it (although even when standing right next to it I was told I CAN'T SEE THAT HERE when attempting to examine it). Many locations lacked anything more than a line telling you where you were and the exits, so any attempts at depth the game might have been going for were quickly lost.

In fact, there were so many things wrong with the game that I was itching to quit it before five minutes had even gone by. For a start, there's no storyline. The intro hints at something about time travel and a hex, which sounded vaguely interesting for a few moments, but the game begins with you pottering around your apartment and won't let you leave because… well, it doesn't say why. Most of the locations are sparsely implemented (and that's being kind) with nothing at all to do in the majority of them. Interaction is mainly done via the side panels and involves you clicking one thing then another. Which is a pain. I'd quite like to see Quest lose the side panels altogether or for them to at least be a little more user friendly. Or for someone to write a Quest game that doesn't require their use at all.

It might seem a little harsh to give yet another rating of 1 out of 10 for this, but there's nothing about it I could recommend so that's the rating I'm going to give it. (1 out of 10)