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I have received the bad news we were afraid of from Slasher's son:

Hi yes my dad passed away back in November due to a heart attack

I will leave the proper eulogy writing to those of you who have known him longer than I, save to say that I will miss his humour and almost endless barrage of games. Fortunately, I haven't been able to play them all yet, though I will. Here's to you, Les. 

I played this yesterday. Great fun!

I downloaded and played through this. I was surprised by the length of the game, I'd say it's more like a medium size than a short game.

In testing, we were clocking under an hour, but obviously with me hovering around and maybe nudging it along.

For the database page, short is 30 minutes or less. (For the annual awards, the medium length games are included in the short category.) Edit: Nope, I misuderstood this, it seems.

Here's my thoughts this month.

Tales From a Forgotten Tavern

Spoiler

Funny and lots and lots of Ponch style dialogue. I like that. There are nods to online RPGs, funny even though I only know about that stuff through the jungle telegraph. I also appreciated the many nods towards this forum's history, understandable even for someone who has played the games and read the posts post-fact.

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Well... Horror, Naturally

Spoiler

Not a game, so there really isn't a contest. However, I was entertained by the scary tale and thought it was quite well put together technically. Some of the pictures were even creepier with the character's heads edited into them. I wasn't quite on board with the shift of endings, and the reveal was a bit too unclear for me to quite understand what the relation between the last one and the killer was. The story was a bit too short to build up tension and care for the characters, but they came across as distinct personalities, at least.

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I voted for

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Forgotten tavern, because this is a game contest.

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Edit: @tbook - please add both this and your first interactive story to the main ags database on the games page.

A Blondbraid/Cassiebsg game sounds like a hit!   

I spent much of a long drive with my kids doing a brainstorm for the theme, and we managed to get some rough ideas sort of connected. But seeing as my kids are a somewhat unreliable workforce, I have my doubts whether we will actually commit to making an entry. Still possible, though.

I downloaded and played through this. I was surprised by the length of the game, I'd say it's more like a medium size than a short game.

I generally had a good time while playing. The main point for me was the silly story and the humour, even if I didn't get the reference in the opening scene. The puzzles I'd describe as fairly easy, but one could still get stuck a couple of places. More importantly, the puzzles were fun to solve. There's a fair amount of moon logic, but it's consistent with the humour in the piece, so I didn't mind.

Graphics are made by some assets and worked fine without making a lasting impression either way. The music was self-composed and quite good, I thought. But the one thing that will divide people here undoubtedly is the synthetic speech. I found it strange, a bit funny and a bit grating at the same time. I'm sure some players will absolutely hate these voices - helpfully there's text on the screen, so one could simply turn the sound off.

I had the game crash on me once, trying to exit somewhere from the street scene. After that I saved regularly and had no more troubles. I couldn't reproduce the crash afterwards.

As your first AGS game, this one is pretty good, and you can pat yourself on the back. I hope you manage to add it to the database and get a few more downloads that way. An area of improvement could be to add interactions for actions that aren't the solution to the problem. Lots of them now simply has no effect, but there ought to be a message to the player that it didn't work. You could easily put in more humour and funny fails if you want to keep polishing your game further.

Hope to see more games from you.

You may add the game to the database, and then simply link to Itch or Steam, which is what most commercial AGS games do. The forum doesn't hold the games for download, that's handled externally in any case.

I'll make sure I purchase this one and grab me some nostalgia from my old Atari ST days. 

Frunobulax!

No, it's not a urinary complaint, it's a game.

Best sale slogan ever!     

Is this a retelling of the story from your games, or is it set somewhere in the continuity? What order do you recommend?

Looking good!

I loved this. Fair warning to all - this is "just" a good read, there are no gameplay elements here. But as an avid reader of graphic novels, I had a good time. It is spectacularly well made. Like, when I click to advance through the pics of the Enterprise launching, and the title tune from Star Trek plays in the background, it adds a lot to the atmosphere.

AGS 2023 GOTY

So far, it's definitely a contender, together with Dreams in the Witchhouse. We'll see which full length games comes out during the remainder of the year. I am sure I will nominate this one in multiple categories. I agree with Wiggy that mother Tiabata is a scene stealer. 

How many accounts has he posted under? Could he also be Icey?! 

He is all of us  except you, Ponch. It started as an April fool joke, then took off a bit.

I played this today, and I have to agree with RootBound. The game is nothing short of great all around.

The first thing you notice, obviously will be that it looks magnificent and sounds superb. But in addition, is is brilliantly written. The world building is fascinating, and the characters came alive to me. I really enjoyed this a lot. 

[NOT recommended]

So, while we wait for https://itch.io/jam/107-adventure-game-challenge ... I thought, why not check out that other adventure jam on Itch, https://itch.io/jam/advjam2023 or Adventure Jam 2023?

And I did, just to find that it had 332 entries! 

No way am I playing all those, I thought. But just as devilish, I wondered, what kind of game actually comes last in this? So I decided to check out the one on the bottom before actually looking at the good games. Thus this first post (if there are others) is just about NOT recommended games.

Card Investigation - Didn't work because of missing files.
Memory Magic - No game to download.
Trek in the Woods - Missing files again.
Harrys_Friends - Game in quarantine, not downloadable.
Space Asteroids - Clearly not an adventure game from the screenshots, so I didn't bother. A comment says ads fill the screen.
Byte Adventure is a platform game. Not recommended, although I did play it and finished it in a couple of minutes.
Fall on Monster Bomb Attack - also quarantined.
Wildwood Nightmares actually is an adventure game, but it is not finished, so it's more of a tech demo now. Not fully playable, unfortunately.
Cool and Slimey Adventures- this looks like it is the same game entered twice. Kind of a short platform game. I played it and beat it in a few goes, so it works, at least.
Rocket Bouncer - This looks like it is made with love, judging from screen shot and description. However, it is clearly a platform game and very far from an adventure, so I didn't want to play it.

So there you go. I wanted to just check out the last one, but ended up checking out the ones placed from #316 to #306. There are clearly some really good games here, too. I hope to play some of them next. 

Thanks, Wiggy! I was able to finish the demo now.

Weird, I was sure I had tried to do it, but I probably used the wrong wording. What I was missing was

Spoiler

Use book on graffitti.

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Seeing as the case is already solved, (Man, it would be fun to revive the Black Stories with some new cases again.) I thought I'd post a similar example of being absent-minded.

So, my brother has this whole ritual when making his morning coffee. He'll heat water in the coffee maker in order to sort of clean it, then pour the hot water in his mug to heat it up while the actual coffee is brewing. Then empty the mug in the sink, pour the fresh coffee into a mug that is warm and won't cool it down too fast.

A lot of you will probably see where this is heading.

Spoiler

Making his morning coffee, he did the process described above purely on routine, not being fully awake. And ended up with pouring the fresh coffee into the sink while holding on to the warm mug filled with hot water.

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This looks and plays quite good. Unfortunately, playability of such games are only as good as their parsers, and I got stuck (see the help thread), possibly looking for a word. At such an early stage (if this is indeed a serious project, and not just made for fun for MAGS), the parser is necessarily limited, and then so is the gameplay. But the "Translation" into this style is very well done. I have played lots of text adventures in my day, and would probably play this one through to the end as well if you decide to make it.

I found a small bug: If you unlock your trunk several times, you score two points each time.

Edit: Finished it with some help from Wiggy. I see that you don't intend to do a full remake. And to be honest, I would rather have you produce your own material, as I enjoy that a lot.

I seem to be stuck at 20 points on the crime scene. One of the screenshots on the game page shows the police station...and 21 points. I guess that means there is only one more thing to do on on the crime scene.

Is it possible to somehow mark the second body? Chalk or tape somehow? Is there a special word command that needs to be used to tell Chester to start taking photos? Is there a way to mark the graffitti as interesting? Or am I missing something else? Any help will be appreciated. 

Take your time, @WHAM, and if you want to return to this somewhere down the line, we will appreciate it. If not, we appreciate what you have given, and you don't owe us a thing. All the best wishes.