IFComp08: Escape from the Underworld
It seems like I've seen this scenario before. Stop me if you've heard this one. There's this demon, right, and he tortures people because that's what he's supposed to do. Only Hell is really bureaucratic and basically a bad 9-5 desk job and he's sick of it and the torture and the screaming, so he wants to escape from Hell and do something better.
Alright maybe not that scenario specifically, but certainly cribbed heavily from places like Sam & Max and several IFs.
Anyway, it's a fairly simple puzzler. You need to get a pass for the elevator, but the cow orker that has it wants you to fix a problem he's having with his soul quota but the bridge is up and you need a crank. So you need to get into the torture chamber to get some tools, but the receptionist won't let you in unless you bribe her with a cigar. The mechanic's got a cigar, but he won't give it to you unless you get him some water (from three freakin' rooms away).
You see where this is going?
It's like a graphical adventure game wherein the NPCs are stationary parts of the scenery was converted to an IF with exactly the same flavor of puzzles. I could easily see Sam & Max or Guybrush Threepwood carrying a mug of water in their inventory, plying the receptionist with cheap cuban cigar. And I'd enjoy it, the silliness of the quests merely punctuated by amusing art, humorous voice acting and casual asides.
But as a text adventure it was way too shallow. Where in a graphical adventure comedy I'm used to trying to click everything with every other thing and it seems reasonable to walk around for ten minutes with a glowing hot poker in my back pocket, it feels forced and pointless in a text adventure.
It doesn't help that there's nothing to replace the graphics or voice acting - the NPCs are mostly non-conversational and the rooms themselves are nearly empty once you get past the initial description.
It also suffered from no small amount of guess-the-verb problems and "Huh?" puzzles which a small team of beta testers should have caught.
5/10. Valiant first try. I hope.