Holy Horrors - Review

This is a compact, often illogical game with several annoyances and poor design choices. The mission is to return a precious goblet to the local church to repay an act of kindness bestowed upon you by the local villagers in the past. The author could have bestowed an equally philanthropic act upon the player and not bothered at all.
The major irritation here lies with the pointlessness of the graphics. Each room is displayed in crude blocks upon first visit only, but the important (takeable) items contained therein do not show up in the pictures, thereby rendering the images worse than useless. This has a knock on effect with typing as mentioned below. Much hilarity can be had though by viewing the picture of the troll (really?) The butler can only be placated via an action I would call a physical impossibility (see below) but at least it is in keeping with the rest of the game.

There are lots of ways to soft and hard lock yourself out of victory (see the butler above.) The sole saving grace for me was the presence of a couple of dreadful puns, both of which are essential to solving the thing. To be honest I am glad to have put this one to bed. Many thanks to Alastair for fixing the original unplayable version but he cannot be blamed for the poor quality of the salvaged wreckage masquerading as entertainment.

Parser/Vocabulary (Rating: 3/10)

Excruciating covers the parser. Few verbs and nouns are recognised and the pictorial representation of each location only appears on first visit as mentioned above; the textual description of the room follows on with the next keyboard press, meaning that the initial letter typed at each location is always missing. LOOK gives a description of the room again except in one location where it is essential to solve a puzzle; it's that kind of game. TAKE ALL, UNDO and almost everything else is missing. EXAMINE parses "it is exactly what it seems" in every single instance that I ever came across. Exits are initially described but after the first few locations they start to be missed off the descriptions. Later on the author seems to have based their inclusion/exclusion on the roll of a dice.

Atmosphere (Rating: 2/10)

Something akin to Venus. "Holy Horrors" may be an unintentionally apposite title though. The location descriptions are terse and lacking any atmosphere and the NPCs are just puzzle extensions.

Cruelty (Rating: Cruel)

Cruel in every sense. You can happily blunder about for ages, unaware that you should not have taken an apparently logical path near the beginning of the game. There are some juicy, two star hotel bed linen type bugs included at no extra cost as well. The dog can be dropped back at its owner's feet, although it still blocks your entrance to the castle some distance away if you fail to apply a not at all obvious footnote to the canine transaction. A certain character can pick things up while handcuffed to a wall (another softlock probably awaits you here) and there is a further unexplained figure who follows you and kills you (possibly a member of The Samaritans) who can appear standing in front of you even if you are underwater in a moat and facing a ravenous crocodile. Later on he appears inside a container for some reason. Maybe he nailed himself in to escape the plot.) One of the objects that has to be purchased from the Market Stall also requires an inspired leap of deduction (or more likely a guess.)

Puzzles (Rating: 3/10)

At best hackneyed, at worst stupid. One puzzle requires the use of two old as the hills magic words which are completely unclued, another involves a moat, a tree and an axe (gosh, I wonder what I should do here?)

The best puzzle revolves around a famous perfume brand (where are Oliver Reed and Alex Higgins when you need them?)

Overall (Rating: 4/10)

I thought about a three but those two bad puns edged it up to a four.