by Roody_Yogurt » Tue Oct 22, 2019 1:19 pm
Magnetic Scrolls games, in general, give me intense mixed feelings. On one hand, the presentation is undeniably cool and a lot of the writing is evocative and memorable. On the other hand, a lot of the games are weirdly buggy (from a company that insisted its parser was "better than Zork") with puzzles on the grindy side and despite all of the moments where the writing shines, in many of the games, it's like they didn't even understand the narrative aspect of IF; most of the games' endings are phenomenally lousy. Still, they're kind of like the Dragon's Lair of IF. Despite all of the flaws, the coolness factor will never let me entirely close the book on them.
As far as Marc Blank goes, I think I enjoyed "Journey" a bit more than most, and since it billed itself as the first of a trilogy, I spent a lot of my youth wondering what those non-existent sequels would have entailed. Now that I've watched the Lord of the Rings movies and recognized various little scenes that "Journey" must have cribbed from those books, those sequels are a little easier to imagine, ha.
Magnetic Scrolls games, in general, give me intense mixed feelings. On one hand, the presentation is undeniably cool and a lot of the writing is evocative and memorable. On the other hand, a lot of the games are weirdly buggy (from a company that insisted its parser was "better than Zork") with puzzles on the grindy side and despite all of the moments where the writing shines, in many of the games, it's like they didn't even understand the narrative aspect of IF; most of the games' endings are phenomenally lousy. Still, they're kind of like the Dragon's Lair of IF. Despite all of the flaws, the coolness factor will never let me entirely close the book on them.
As far as Marc Blank goes, I think I enjoyed "Journey" a bit more than most, and since it billed itself as the first of a trilogy, I spent a lot of my youth wondering what those non-existent sequels would have entailed. Now that I've watched the Lord of the Rings movies and recognized various little scenes that "Journey" must have cribbed from those books, those sequels are a little easier to imagine, ha.