Fun tribute to Sierra's adventures
This is a fun tribute to the Sierra adventures of yore, like the Police Quest and King's Quest series, and shares many of the attributes which made them so enjoyable, including a humorous quest and decent puzzles. It might not an earth-shatteringly good game, but for fans of the genre, it does a good job. The plot revolves around the life of a geeky teenager who needs to organise a party to prove to his mother that he not's an anti-social freak, and this change to the usual fantasy narratives of similar games makes for a refreshingly different take on the genre. The game uses a standard text-based parser, with the player using it to input commands to speak with the other characters and solve the puzzles. The rest of the game follows the traditional style of these games, with nothing much to mark it out as different but which performs adequately enough. The story is reasonably compelling, with Hank making for an engaging and likeable enough hero, while the writing is competent if not exactly first rate. The graphics however are actually more than decent, with bright and detailed environments that give the game a lot of personality. The puzzles let things down a bit, being no more than ordinary and which are unfortunately a bit too random for their own good, relying more on trial and error than logical thinking. The parser too is somewhat limited, only recognising a relatively small number of commands, which adds to the frustration. If you can get past these niggles though, there is a solid, if uninspiring adventure to be enjoyed here.
