itch.io

I didn't get watermelon juice!

I'm not a connoisseur of gamebooks, but I think this one is on the simpler side—complex enough to be engaging for a few hours, not an epic "whoa I'm gonna need more notepaper" kind of thing.  At the very end of the game, I was starting to wish there were a little more variety in random encounters (which I guess means that the level of variance is pretty well-matched to the scale of the game). 

In a short time and confined space, the game does manage to feel like a Metroid game, not only in collecting upgrades to squish aliens, not only in piecing together alien lore and federation logs, but in the sense of exploration, the feeling of "oooh, I think something is hidden here!" I think the amount of mechanical complexity is very well-tuned to suit this purpose. Making missiles and bombs use the same resource, for example, is a very smart choice. The system of spare tanks is really clever as well.

I found the rules to be a little underdefined in a couple places. If I use a bomb to open a cache that refills a tank, and I don't have any tanks yet, is the effect wasted? Can I come back and get it later, and if so, do I have to use another bomb to open it again? Can I use a cache more than once? (I don't think there are any "use missiles to pass this door" connections that I'd want to pass through twice, but if I did, would I need to use more missiles?)

There's one confusing bit that I think must be a "bug": The Game Over rules say if I reach 0 EP, I go back to the starting room with "half my current EP" (which should always be 0), but the effect in the starting room says I refill to max EP anyway. There's no connection back to the starting room from page 11, so the only way to get back to my ship to heal up is by dying, I think? It looks like a couple different philosophies of how healing should work are overlapping.

Thank you for making this!!!

They go on the panels (or whatever they're called) on top of the box you got them out of!

It worked!!!

What a delightfully dreadful little outing! I hope everyone will play this entry as well as mine, and bear witness to the SHOCKING NUMBER OF IDEAS THAT HAVE BEEN STOLEN FROM ME

That sucks! There is some machinery in there to prevent unwinnable states but it might not be (probably is not) 100% effective. Some spots you might check out: The grotesques in the first room, the statue on the balcony, under the bed, inside the casket (and the statue of Aeternitas), the feasting hall table, the urns in the ancient tomb, maybe the shelves in the laboratory, maybe the bricks on the roof.

This “machinery”  works by transferring “leftover” attack power to unused weapons when you deal damage in excess of a monster’s remaining HP. If you can access the final boss, you should be able to access all the weapons, so the game should still be winnable—unless the power-transfer somehow sent some attack power to a weapon you’ve already used, which would be very stupid, but I *think* I prevented that.

On the other hand, before you unlock the final boss, the game could transfer some critical quantity of attack power to weapons gated behind the enemy who you need that attack power to defeat. The code is not sophisticated enough to prevent this. So it might be a problem.

If you restart the game, you’ll start at the beginning of the vampire-tale, and the spare damage will probably be allocated better. Sorry.

On top of adding modules, if I were to do a Volume 2 I’d definitely add more stuff to do while sneaking off to pee.