Hungry Goblin by Dave Aldridge
Blurb: "Feed the hungry goblin. This is a demo and not very big yet but is actually a complete unit. Treat your aim as "get into the tavern". Game runs out there!"
Descriptive Level
Descriptions were a little more verbose than most Quest games, but only a little. The game might go from a reasonably decent (by the standards of the last few Quest games I've played anyway) location description such as
YOU ARE IN A NARROW TUNNEL.
THERE IS A POINTY STICK HERE.
YOU CAN GO EAST, WEST, UP OR DOWN.
THERE IS A FAINT SMELL OF GOBLIN HERE. THE TUNNEL SLOPES UP TO THE EAST, WHERE THERE IS A SMALL GLIMMER OF LIGHT, AND DOWN TO THE WEST, WHERE IT GETS DIMMER.
to something like:
YOU ARE IN A CAVE ENTRANCE, BY A SWAMP.
THERE IS A FEARLESS DRAGON-SLAYER AND A CAMPFIRE HERE.
YOU CAN GO EAST, WEST OR DOWN.
Now the first makes an effort to add a bit of depth to the game (and succeeds), the second doesn’t.
Spelling and grammar-wise, the game has few faults. The writing isn't especially polished and only rarely has any real effort been expended to make it any more readable, but there's nothing especially horrible here.
Plot
Sparse. In the extreme. You're a goblin, you're in a cave and you're hungry. That’s it. You wander from place to place, finding food, eating it, and then hunting for some more.
It’s possible to die regularly. The hunger factor (an unpopular theme in IF precisely because it’s such a pain) kicks in after a while and kills you off if you haven't eaten anything. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t actually tell you this is going to happen beforehand, so it’s likely you'll need to die to discover it. If you're going to kill the player off, particularly in a game written with a system that doesn’t have an UNDO command, you ought to warn the player beforehand that it could happen. Eat food and your hunger timer decreases a little, giving you a bit more time to find some more food, although it’s kind of strange seeing my little goblin drop dead of hunger two minutes after he’s stuffed himself on some venison.
Interaction
Better than average for a Quest game. There were a few honest to god puzzles here in relation to some of the objects, and I even managed to use a few of them to perform simple tasks. On the negative side, the game uses the same kind of bizarre wording that seems prevalent in Quest games. If you're carrying, say, a stick and need to pick up, say, some venison with it, you can’t type the simple and straightforward GET VENISON WITH STICK but instead USE STICK ON VENISON. Still, as this is the kind of thing I've come across in more than a few games before (Quest games and otherwise), it didn’t require too much of an effort to figure out what I needed to do.
Another refreshing thing, and so rare in Quest games in general, is that items and NPCs don’t necessarily need to be referred to by their full name to be recognised. So the fearless dragon-slayer can be referred to as slayer and will still be recognised. I wish a few more authors did this.
Stability
The game didn’t crash on me (thankfully) and I didn’t run into anything that was definitely a bug, although the hunger timer certainly needed some work. A proper timer shouldn’t increase itself when a typo is entered, or when you're saving or loading the game.
Originality
Well, I've never before played a game where I was a goblin who needed to eat every few minutes or die of hunger, so in that sense the game was original indeed. At the same time, it wasn’t a particularly good idea, and after dying a dozen times in almost as many minutes from hunger, the novelty was beginning to wear mighty thin.
Overall
An amusing little, albeit frustrating, game if you have five minutes to spare. If it was improved with a bit of background, some better location descriptions, and maybe even a hint or two to steer the player in the right direction, it might not be a bad game at all.
3 out of 10
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