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Greek School Adventure Reviews
Author: Dan McCurdy
Date: 2007
ADRIFT 4.0
Reviewed by revgiblet
After prompting and prodding from other forum members I've
decided to post a review of Greek School Adventure, a recent new download on the
site.
Greek School Adventure casts the player as a seminary student at Columbia
Theological School tasked with the noble quest of attempting to pass their Greek
class. It's the author's first game and he has clearly taken more care than most
new authors. This is good.
In some ways I'm the ideal audience for this game. As a (currently ex) minister
myself I will be one of the few people who might stand a chance of getting the
'in-jokes' mentioned by the author. The Baptist ministerial training process in
the UK is clearly different from the Presbyterian US system, but who cares. It's
all the same right? Except I managed to get all the way through my training
without taking any Greek classes. All this aside, I'm the perfect person to play
Greek School Adventure. No, really. I am.
I ran into problems right away with the game. The player begins in a darkened
room and so begins the "switch the light on" puzzle. Except "switch the light
on" doesn't work. Neither does "turn light on". However, "turn on light" does. I
didn't need to turn the light on at first though, as the author didn't disable
'auto-complete' so I was able to raid the contents of my room by typing letters
and seeing what nouns were automatically completed for me. That is exactly why I
always disable 'auto-complete'.
Having got dressed, brushed my teeth (which is good for holiness apparently),
picked up and read the note that had been slid under my door and wondered out of
the room I was at a loss what to do next. So I ambled around the seminary for a
while just looking at stuff until I got totally stumped and quit the game.
The map is apparently an attempt at realistically modelling the seminary site,
and that's to be commended, but it creates a sense of aimlessness (my
spell-check tells me that that is an actual word). As a sandbox playground it's
a fine piece of work. As a game I found myself lacking direction. This wasn't
helped by the lack of coherent conversation that the NPCs offered.
By far the most traumatic moment for me came when I found a copy of John
Calvin's 'Institutes of the Christian Religion' and wasn't able to read it. Or
take it. Or interact with it at all. I'm still shuddering just thinking about
it.
On the plus side, the writing was of above average quality and I got the
definite sense that there was an enjoyable game hiding there somewhere. Maybe
it's my sympathies with the environment that the author has tried to create, but
I had a good time wondering around and exploring every nook and cranny. However,
one can only go on for so long without a sense of purpose.
All in all, as a first game Greek School Adventure shows plenty of promise and
humour. I think that in this case 'less is more' and if Dan can provide a
smaller map, more focus and fix up some of the bugs then he'll have written one
of the best 'first-time-author' games that I've played in a long time. I'll
await an updated version.
Reviews should be considered copyrighted by their respective authors.
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