Ozapell Mystery Text Adventure

Ozapell Mystery Text Adventure (OMTA) is a text adventure with an interesting concept that gets horribly mutilated by a crude presentation, a primitive parser, and bland writing. It was also coded in a clunky programming language that apparently made it hard to include even the most basic usability features. I've been in love with text adventures ever since the first Zork found its way to my C64, and whenever I see one on Steam, I really want to like it - but in this case, I just can't. This is not a retro game, it's a considerably-worse-than-retro-ever-was game. After the 20-30 minutes that I needed for my first playthrough, it unfortunately became obvious how lackluster it was in practically every single aspect. Where to begin? Let's have a word about presentation first, and then I'll go through the main components of a text adventure - puzzles, writing, and parser. Fair warning: One of my usual walls of text is following, for those who are interested in a detailed analysis. :) [b][u]1. Presentation[/u][/b] This isn't the most important aspect of a text-based game, nor is it terribly difficult to get right, but OMTA manages to botch it up. The text is in all-caps in a crude fi…

Very charming old school whodunnit where the solution is different every play through. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

This game is about halfway there. The text adventure style is nostalgic and fun, and there's something so enjoyable about interviewing suspects in a Clue-like mystery. However, there's just not enough content, and because of that, it ends up being dissatisfying. The mystery is randomized each time you play, which is nice for replay value, but it makes the game itself less fun because some of the content is fixed and therefore has no bearing on the solution. I'm not sure if this is a spoiler, but from what I can tell, [spoiler] the discussions with each of the characters don't really matter. At least in the two rounds I played, the dialogue about the characters stays the same, which means there's no point in grabbing a notepad and taking down what they have to say (as I did the first time around). Instead, the mystery revolves only around the clues you find, which are random each time. Once you know that, you can play the entire game in five minutes.[/spoiler] There are very few things you need to "figure out"--though some of the earlier text-based adventure games were infuriating in how you had to phrase the command JUST right to get what you need, at least there was a puzzle-sol…