Bael's Rock: A Text Adventure

After playing through most of the game I can safely say it's much more fun than it seems at first glance. Take aside minor technical difficulties (from what I've seen it's authors first game of this genre) and you'll spend quality time fiddling with miscellaneous puzzles and riddles, not without a giggle or two from time to time. Some themes even brought back memories of Zork played during my ancient uni times. Pros: - Good writing - Text interpreter that differs from what industry got you used to - Humour - Difficulty level Cons: - Early levels might feel a bit abstract (but it does actually change later on) - Gamelog could use a bit of tweaking - Minor technical shortcomings, rewarded with absurdity of some accepted combinations

An enigma-riddled mountain. -------------------------------------- The Stranger left you in the Desert. Across the Chasm is a Mountain. In the Mountain is a Cave. Bael’s Rock presents the player with an interesting mix of a traditional cave-crawl and a mystery driven storyline. All the action takes place underground, in a series of obstacle-loaded caverns and chambers. While the descriptions of these locations do convey a sense of mood and aesthetic, they are mostly (necessarily) focused on clear depiction of the contents of the room. The chambers are relatively small and self-contained puzzle-areas, each an escape-room of sorts unto itself. This means that the large-scale exploration and map-drawing aspect that normally accompanies large cave-adventures is not present here. Once a room is solved, the protagonist moves to the next location of interest without guidance from the player. This design means that the free exploration (and map-drawing) itch I so love to scratch is absent from the game. And I have to admit that I missed it a bit; an adventure in mysterious cave-system seems to demand elaborate investigation of multiple crawlspaces and looping pathways, and the intricat…