11.15.2010

If Comp: The People's Glorious Revolutionary Text Adventure Game

Author: Taylor Vaughan
System: Z-code 
Blurb: Blurb: Sure, there's only five of you against a world full of reactionaries, but you have Revolutionary Spirit! You can't possibly fail. Nothing can stand in your way! Now if only you could find your Revolutionary to-do list...
Time Played: about an hour
More (with spoilers) after the break, you may wish to play before reading...


Review: Wanna have a Communist party? You have to start a Revolution first! Once you find your Revolutionary to-do list, the game progresses through a series of puzzles to win Freedonia over from the capitalists. The game is pretty player friendly, letting you solve the puzzles (up until the ending) in any order, and providing multiple solutions to the puzzles. There's also a device that basically works as a shortcut for any one puzzle of your choice. And even at the end of the game, you'll have multiple chances to get things right.

I really had a lot of fun with this game. I appreciated that the Marx references were not all to Karl, but also to Groucho and company. Pointing the Ventriloquator (which fortunately you can refer to simply as mk) at people was a blast. And there's some really great responses to things like kissing comrade Rosalia, or trying to take the placard. I wished there was an AMUSING section at the end to see more little touches I might have missed.

While I appreciate that the game doesn't take itself too seriously, there were a few things that could definitely be stronger in the game. Like some minor spacing issues, and ending up with stuff in my inventory which I thought I had already used up earlier in the game. Also, at the end, I had trouble getting the wording right to do what I wanted to do.

In general those little things were more than made up for by the enthusiasm of the game and the humor (I laughed out loud more than once). There's even a recommended soundtrack you can download to play in the background. This game generated a lot of goodwill from me which I intend to return in scoring it. Call me old-fashioned, but I like it when games are actually fun.

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