Game Profile

Author David Whyld Idiom English Authoring System Adrift Release Year 2007 IFR Overall Rating

You're an eyeball.

You're also the King, and expected to rule the kingdom despite your currently disabled condition.

That's the premise of The Reluctant Resurrectee, and while it's a well-written and humorous story, the implementation leaves something to be desired.

As an eyeball, most normal actions are closed to you. You can't TAKE things, you can't PUSH or PULL them, and so on. You'd think this could lead to some interesting puzzles, but there are no great "Aha!" moments here. There are a few verbs you can use, not hard to figure out, and most of the game can be solved by trying these on every noun mentioned in every room description. Not that the puzzles are really bad; they're simply bland.

Not all the verbs you'd expect to be implemented are implemented, making an otherwise nice puzzle extremely irritating. And once something I expected (judging from the room description) to be one object was actually implemented as two, making it easy to miss an important clue.

It's very easy to lock yourself out of victory. It would have been a lot easier if it were not for a bug which allowed me to pass from the desk to the mantel and back again as often as I pleased. These kinds of limitations wouldn't be such a problem in a better-clued game, but are terribly inconvenient in The Reluctant Resurrectee.

Still, it's not all bad. The writing is good (apart from typos such as "mantle"): not laugh-out-loud funny, but smile-funny. There is a tendency toward text-dumping, especially at the end of the game, but the text-dumps are worth reading so I'm not complaining too much.

This could be a fun game. But at the moment, it needs a lot of work.