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Non-review of Reefer Island
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emshort@mindspring.com  
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 More options May 30 2004, 4:04 pm
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
From: emsh...@mindspring.com (emsh...@mindspring.com)
Date: 30 May 2004 13:04:26 -0700
Local: Sun, May 30 2004 4:04 pm
Subject: Non-review of Reefer Island
Reefer Island
by Steve Barrera

This is interesting.  To the best of my knowledge, the author didn't
announce this game on the newsgroups; I hadn't heard of it at all
until a friend and I looking for something to play stumbled across it
on Baf's.  It's listed as having been uploaded sometime this year.

As you might guess from the title, it's a game about, er, the quest
for your next bong hit.  With a premise like that you might expect a
rather half-baked short comedy game, but in fact it's an old-school
puzzle-fest with a spacious map.  We ran into a few bugs, but for the
most part it was pretty well-coded, if a little sparse here and there.
 All of which is in tune with the style of older-style adventures.

The puzzles themselves are very old-fashioned in character: a lot of
them (at least in the portion I saw) seemed to entail finding the
right object to give to the NPC to get another object to use to get
something else... (etc), often through fairly long and convoluted
chains.  There is what appeared to be a genuine maze, though we didn't
persist long enough to get it fully mapped.  There are improbable
leaps of logic and NPCs who seem able to teleport across the map just
in order to prevent you from doing things.  It's that sort of game,
and you either get into the mood and enjoy it, or you don't.

I mostly did.  We might have finished it, or at least gone further, if
it weren't for the bewildering openness of the game.  Many many
locations and puzzles are simultaneously accessible from the outset,
so we wandered around for a long time before deciding that we were
either stuck or insufficiently directed.  And the game has both hunger
and sleep timers turned on, as well as the occasional message about
how long it's been since your last hit.  It's very easy to die before
you've really gotten your bearings or figured out how to get your food
source, let alone found any pot.  When this happened to us, we became
discouraged and gave up.

Still, I could easily see someone enjoying "Reefer Island" if they
were on an old-school nostalgia kick (and not too hung up about the
drug use).  The writing is good-spirited.  There are monkeys.


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