Category: Accessible Games
hello all,
For those interested in audio games, text adventures or adventure games, there's a new one out now which was funded by kickstarter. It's called - as the title implies - Grail to the Thief. it was featured on Adventuregamers.com, which is a great source for all things adventure games of all types. I'll paste a link to the story below. A game like this will likely be judged based on its writing and sound, and it sounds like it might be good, according to a number of sourced articles.
Grail to the Thief article
I should point out that it's only $5, which for a game of any kind is pretty good. I purchased it mainly out of curiosity, and to be supportive. Though the kickstarter video put me off a little.
So many of these are on Windows. I use Windows for work mostly, and my iOS devices when not at work. I appreciate the games / audio games that come out for the platform I acutally use for play.
Wonder how it is for most people on here? In offline life this is often what I observe, people use their tablets and phnes for play, some work if it's documents and such. And Windows is just for the workplace anymore.
I can't speak for anyone here, but given the massive amount of games for Windows coming out these days I would think it's safe to say windows is going strong. That said, I imagine it would be a pretty easy game to port to IOS and the like.
Hey guys, we're the team behind Grail to the Thief.
The Blind Guardian - Thanks for supporting the game. How do you like it? If you don't mind us asking, what about our Kickstarter video put you off?
LeoGuardian - We are working on a mobile port of Grail to the Thief for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Windows RT devices. It's currently planned for release in December, but that may change if we run into trouble getting the game accepted into the various app stores.
Hello there,
I enjoyed the concept and style of the game. I am a lover of both classic and modern adventure games - My all-time favorites being the Tex Murphey, Gabriel Knight and Longest Journey series). I am also both an avid reader and writer of fiction, and a talented - if still closeted - audio theatre designer. To that end, I found Grail to the Thief both an enjoyable and underwhelming half an hour.
POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT!
Brief notes
- using audio theatre in conjunction with an old-school text adventure was brilliant. It opened up a wealth of potential interaction possibilities. I liked the intigration between character dialog and description of the surroundings. but many were under-utilized, and the interactions with other characters were shallow.
- The sound design, especially the ambiance was pretty decent, as was some of the voice acting; particularly the AI time machine. Whoever voiced the protagonist wasn't bad, but I think his delivery was hampered by what he was saying. More on that later.
- The interface was easy to navigate, except for the inaccessible options screen and other controls. I had to use the mouse to access these, but on my computer the mouse disappeared. Could be a video issue on my end, but would still help to have it accessible for those unable to use a mouse.
- Absense of a save system. It's a very short game, but it might help to include one. If there was one, I could not find it.
- Quality of the writing and characters. This is the meat of any adventure, and my biggest point of contention. I can forgive a lot of gameplay flaws if a story absorbs my attention. I'll say this, the premmace has a lot of promise; however I found a lot of the humor shallow, and the protagonist extremely unlikable. He is neither an anti-hero we can root for, or a villian we can love to hate. He's simply an all-out jerk at times. Should I mention the children? The situations I found myself in, and the people I spoke to left me hollow and unfulfilled. The only saving grace is the centient time machine who, as irony would have it often vocalized my internal frustration with the protagonist. I understand some of my story complaints are likely due to the budget and scope of the project. And audio games are not known for their narrative ambition in my admitedly limited experience. But I don't think this really worked as either a story geared for children, or one for adults. Saying all that, I did appreciate the final scene in which everything we've been doing takes its turn. I'm reminded of the ending to Ace Ventura: When Nature calls, except for that whole virgin bit.
As for the kickstarter campaign, it did give a good overall idea of what the game would be. It was intersting enough to prompt me to buy the finished copy, and while my experience was a little disappointing, I'm very glad I purchased it and supported you. I first heard about the game on adventuregamers.com, my go to web site for all things of the genre. The overall tone of the video sort of left me feeling like a child, and not in that gleeful way. I'll have to re-watch the video to be specific, but that is my overall recollection.
Thanks for the detailed response. Up until now, the only complaints we've received are "it's too short" and "it's too easy", so it's nice to receive detailed, constructive criticism that we can apply toward future projects.
You hit the nail on the head when you said "some of my story complaints are likely due to the budget and scope of the project". The $10,000 we raised may seem like a lot of money, but once you factor in Kickstarter and Amazon fees, the cost of the software we had to purchase, and the cost to manufacture and ship all the Kickstarter backers' physical rewards, we weren't left with a lot of money - and what was left still had to cover paying all the voice actors and other individuals that worked on the project. We did the math beforehand, so all of this was accounted for, but we had to limit the scope of the project to fit within this limited budget. Unfortunately, this meant that we weren't able to hire a writer to work on the project and had to do all the writing ourselves. If we get the chance to produce another audio game in the future, the first thing we are going to do is hire a dedicated writer to work on the script.
The absence of a save system was a limitation of the plug-in we used alongside the game engine. We are able to save a players progress, but the plug-in will not allow us to load the area the player was in upon saving - it always starts at the Main Menu. The game is short enough that it's not a huge deal, but I must admit that it would have been nice if we could have gotten it to work.
What platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) are you playing the game on? Do you know your system specs? This is the first report we've received of the mouse cursor disappearing in the menus. If you can provide us with your platform and system specs we can look into this some more.