Tim Sibiski

Text adventure games by Tim Sibiski

Reviews by Tim Sibiski

Review for Heliacal Hostility
08 Mar 2013
The following is a series of first impressions with this game, and a little bit of explanation for why these things were issues. For your first game, I think you did okay, but there are a lot of things that keep the game from being playable for me. It looks like you have potential though, so please take the following, not as an insult, but an opportunity to make yourself more awesome.

You are in a darkness.

“You notice your body has felt numb up to this point, but feelings slowly returning with a jarring sensation of pins and needles lightly touching your skin.” Read that out load several times and you will see what is wrong with that.

“you cringe as the brightness assails your eyes, unaccustomed to such an intense illumination.” This sounds like you made a sentence, and then looked at a thesaurus for bigger words. Mark Twain once said (paraphrased), “The difference between a good word and the perfect word is like the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”

Up until this point, you don’t put much spacing between paragraphs. This is hard to read at the moment.

Why do you leave verbs like “take” on objects that cannot possibly/logically be taken, like “darkness”?

This is the first room that I can enter, to the west. It has no description.

> west
You are in a Technicians workshop.
You can see a fish bowl, a duct tape, a pipe hosing, a plastic garbage bag, a boxcutter knife and a mess of wiring.
You can go east.


There’s a few errors here – “Technician’s” , “a duct tape”

Not a big deal in the big picture (I make plenty of these errors, but you gotta’ try to catch most of them), but they add up.

Here’s something that bothers me a bit,
“You somewhat haphazardly combine all the items you've gathered. Using the entire roll of duct tape, you attach one end of the pipe hosing to the fish bowl, and you duct tape the other end into the plastic bag. the fishbowl h

Review for First Times
26 Feb 2013
Hi Hero Robb,

What I Liked:
- Excellent descriptions
- Excellent grammar. I saw one error throughout the entire game, where "door" was spelled "doo" (this is huge as I have simply stopped playing most of the other highly-rated text adventures because the author doesn't know even basic grammar.)
- Great puzzles; they were complex, but the only time I got stuck in the game was when I tried to figure out how to read the journal. I tried everything except for "read" and was stumped as to why I couldn't "open" it. lol

What I Did Not Like:
- The music and most sound files; all they did was annoy me. Most others seemingly liked them, but I had to take my headphones off, otherwise the sounds would have made me quit the game.
- The ending; although there wasn't much story before the ending sequence, the result was disappointingly convoluted, although I am pretty sure I know what happened. I think I would have liked more story before this story dump.
- Why would I inject foreign liquid into my veins? Injecting water into your veins can kill you (since it's not the right Ph), much less something else.


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Despite all of this, you deserve a five. Well done.