In the great game catalogue of life, sometimes there comes a title that makes you step back and really assess what you are. Are you a P.C. gamer or a counsel gamer? Do you have the patience to sit at a desk and evaluate every single word of a sentence, divining a strategy from sometimes the barest scraps of logic? Or do you like to blow stuff up real good? I, being firmly of the counsel-playing set, usually find very little reason to invest such time into carefully exhausting all avenues of action and logic in a graphical text adventure.
In the great game catalogue of life, sometimes there comes a title that makes you step back and really assess what you are. Are you a P.C. gamer or a counsel gamer? Do you have the patience to sit at a desk and evaluate every single word of a sentence, divining a strategy from sometimes the barest scraps of logic? Or do you like to blow stuff up real good? I, being firmly of the counsel-playing set, usually find very little reason to invest such time into carefully exhausting all avenues of action and logic in a graphical text adventure. It would take a real hook to make anyone used to blowing zombies in twain (preferably with a rocket launcher) and saving princess through
the empowering might of mushrooms to play a game that relies on wit instead of reflexes. In this aspect, Eric the Unready is almost a perfect starter for those easing into the ‘thinking man’s’ (?) genre.
Not that Eric the Unready is particularly smart, or deep, or easy, or… I’ll stop there. Eric the Unready is a good transition title because behind the fiendish (to some) puzzles lies a very compelling wit that takes away some of the frustration that would otherwise turn initiates away from this genre.
Eric the Unready operates on a humour style somewhere between Monty Python, Terry Pratchet, Saturday Night live and people slipping on bananas. Although it is set in a fantasy world, it manages to contain satires from around the board. From mocking human interest news articles to Star Trek, the jokes have a surprising wide scope. This proves to be good thing, too, because the appeal of Eric the Unready largely rests on its sense of humour. People who would be normally leery of the sword and sorcery type story could easily find themselves enchanted by the light hearted tomfoolery of Eric and forget about the setting all together.
The puzzles, the meat of the game, can be obscure to those not familiar with some of the series or situations it mocks. For instance, a healthy knowledge of ‘Lord of the Rings’ is pretty much a prerequisite to understanding just exactly one would do with a ‘semi-precious’ ring. The solutions are creative, and might require a fair amount of trial and error to philistines (such as myself), unused to not having solutions blatantly obvious.
Eric the Unready, as I am lead to believe, is not the pinnacle of its genre. Although it is the humour that draws you into the world, it is also the humour that keeps you from being immersed. It is not a great, sweeping adventure, but then again it doesn’t try to be one. As it stands, it is a funny, creative game that is a good taste of what an adventure can be but not of what an adventure should be. All in all, however, it is a good download in which to invest your hard earned credits.
