King Arthur's Night Out / Mikko Vuorinen (1999)

Game Information

Mikko Vuorinen is one smart dude. I've pretty much enjoyed all of his Alan games(yep, I've played all that are publicly available), and enjoyed them well enough to stick Mikko on top of my list of writers to interview sometime soon. But Mikko has really topped himself with King Arthur's Night Out. He writes the best Alan games around more or less by default(Alan games are still relatively scarce, and generally have not been very high in quality on average), but this game is simply a step above anything else he's produced. It's not necessarily that the game is all that impressive when you take into account all the great text adventures ever written: it's too small to be considered even a minor "classic" according to my standards. But it's entertaining! You're King Arthur, lusty leader of the Round Table. You want to go out drinkin' with the boyz, but thy lovely wife Queen Guinevere won't let you. Bitch! You've got to find a way to get out of the castle without her knowing it so you can have some FUN for a darned change. As the title screen proclaims, "Sometimes it's just not good enough to be the king."

I finished the game in twenty minutes. The only hard part involved a cutting utensil and fabric, and that was only hard because of the parser. I really enjoyed those twenty minutes, however. The writing was clever and effective - just how I like it. Almost everything in the game has some use to it, and the puzzles make an alarming amount of sense. I can't tell you how enjoyable it is to play an adventure game that seems to have been written with just you in mind. Most everything I tried worked in this game! This game definitely goes to show that Alan is a developement system that could be put to great use by clever writers. Sure, the parser is not as strong as the Inform parser just yet, but I feel like this could probably be evened out better than the primitive AGT parser could be. What this game reminds me of most of all is old Sierra games. It has that "Sierra" feel to it - that whimsical approach to the plot that doesn't bring out whimsicalness from the player, that same approach to puzzle solving requiring inventive usages for found objects... I dunno. I just got that vibe from it for some reason, but that's definitely not a bad thing. Sierra Online used to make great games. In short, this game is one you should rent from your local interactive fiction shop immediately. How could you not like a game that includes the immortal line, "Woman! Come here! I want sex!"? It's impossible! Overall, I'm giving the game an eight, but in terms of comp voting I'm giving it a '9'. It's the ideal, short, funny, entertaining comp game. Not art, but fun. If nothing else, it gets you in the mood to tackle something heavier. And it sure has a kooky ending!

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