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SUDS (included games)

aka: Cave Hunt, Roman Adventure II
Moby ID: 37808

Description

The SUDS text adventure creator/player package comes with a demo tutorial game, Cave Hunt, and also Roman Adventure II, which revisits the setting of Roman from Peter Killworth's 1984 book How to Write Adventure Games for the BBC Microcomputer Model B and Acorn Electron, superimposing new puzzles on an existing game skeleton.

In this game the player controls the actions of a citizen of ancient Rome living close to the bone, finding himself with one day to repay a debt to the sinister Senator Ganopus under pain of... well, some imaginative Roman torture. Numerous tangential escapades ensue.

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Based on "Roman" by

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Trivia

This game's source, Killworth's "Roman", is cited in item 50 of the Fourth edition of the Inform Designer's Manual, epitomizing a style of game design led by throwing all conceivable obstacles one can come up with between points A and B:

Another approach is to chain backwards from a goal, repeatedly asking “how can I obstruct this further?” Peter Killworth describes an entire game this way. Thus you need to pay a debt to a Senator, so you need to steal a bust from a temple, but that means impersonating a priest, by sacrificing a chicken with a gladius, which means catching a chicken (you scare it with a cat, but the cat must be attracted by a mouse, which you need to catch with a mousetrap): and the gladius isn't just lying around, either. You also need a torch, which

"… needs soaking in oil first, just as candles need wax to burn. So we'd better organise a pool of oil through which the player can walk … When the player gets to a source of flame – how about a brazier of coals, which will have to be untakeable? – he can attempt to light his torch. It isn't oily, it burns to a stump well-nigh instantly … If it is oily, it'll catch fire … No, that's too simple. If a player is soaked in oil too, he'll probably catch fire too! … We'll create a damp, misty area, where the player is assassinated by a runaway slave, unless he enters while on fire. Then he will be safe, because the mist will condense on his body … So the poor player, staggering around and on fire, will try the mist, but to his disappointment the torch will go out permanently too! The solution is trivial – he must drop the torch before entering the mist."

This kind of plotting, with puzzles strung together like beads onto a necklace, offers the considerable advantage of lending coherency. But it is also liable to make long, linear sequences of puzzles which must be completed in an exact order.

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Game added by Pseudo_Intellectual.

Additional contributors: formercontrib.

Game added December 3, 2008. Last modified February 22, 2023.