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Coffee Quest II

Author: Anonymous
Language: TADS2
Genre: Office humor
Score: 6

While the premise of "Coffee Quest" is fun in a light and playful way, I found the game to be inconsistent as well as plagued by a number of small bugs and textual missteps. "The basket is a cool metal cylinder design, a bit like the one in Ditch Day Drifter, but more space age looking." Having never playing DDD, that description really doesn't mean much to me, though I knew it wasn't really important considering it was just a wastebasket. There was an instance where even though examining a flyer and reading a flyer gave you almost the identical information, reading it increased your score, while examining it did not.

Most of the rest of the nitpicks I encountered were visual errors, such as extra spaces or newlines between words and punctuation. Probably the most amusing was when I examined a sofa and was presented with "The sofa is fashioned from the best leatherette money can buy. The dormant form of a security guard occupies most of its length!There's nothing on the sofa."

Still, it wouldn't be fair to present only the minor negatives of the game. It was still pretty fun, and the author was not afraid to use his imagination. Attempting to wear all the items in your possession ("WEAR ALL") presented a litany of humorous responses for each piece of inventory. ("roll of toilet paper: No, you went to the Christmas do as a mummy last year. Shame it wasn't fancy dress though.")

The puzzles were generally pretty straightforward, except for the final one which involved having to open an umbrella, even though the game was extremely vague about where the sprinkler was going off. Though it was supposed to be pouring water in the board room, the room desc never said anything about it when you got in there. I found this game to be overall a good attempt, though in desperate need of some general play-testing and lots of editing.

(View this game on Baf's Guide to IF or The IF Ratings Site)

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