Castaway
NAME:
Castaway
GAMEPLAY: No synonyms
AUTHOR:
Conrad Button
PLOT: Rudimentary
EMAIL:
?
ATMOSPHERE: None
AVAILABILITY:
MS-DOS
WRITING: Basic
PUZZLES:
Basic
SUPPORTS: MS-DOS
CHARACTERS:
None
DIFFICULTY: Novice
In Castaway, by Conrad Button, you are first mate of the cargo
ship, Katie Sue (I don't
know why, but I suspect that this is Button's daughter. A little nepotism
here, hmm?). When your ship is smashed on a reef, you fortunately wash
ashore on an island that has a rescue ship anchored a mile away. Your job
is to find the fixins' for a signal fire, as well as locate ten treasures
hidden on the island.
The mixing of the rescue theme with the treasure hunt theme produces some bizarre results. Though you will probably spot the ship a few moves after landing, you will avoid signalling it until you've gotten all the treasures. In real life you'd be much more concerned that the ship might leave. You can get around this problem by signalling the ship but not boarding it until you've gotten all the treasures, but this creates another bizarre situation: the ship sitting in the lagoon waiting around until you feel like being rescued ("Snap it up fella, we haven't got all day!").
In your search, you will encounter the lost city of Pango Tongo, which has several of the treasures you need. We are never told anything about this city like "what is it doing there," and "what happened to the people". It is just there.
The game features the traditionally bad Buttonware parser; two-word input and absolutely no synonyms. If you call the "parrot" a "bird," the game will have no idea what you're talking about. The game's difficulty level is Novice, so you probably won't have much trouble solving it anyway, but generally introductory games should be as user-friendly as possible, to encourage the player to play more text games. This one doesn't.
One nice feature (that I wish more Introductory games would emulate) is that each room lists the directions that you can travel on a separate line. This is much easier for the novice trying to draw his first map than having to pick all of the directions out of the room description.
Castaway is not up to scratch by 1995 standards, but one must remember that it was written in the pre GAGS/LADS/AGT/TADS/Inform days of 1986. Under the circumstances, putting out any shareware text game at all was an impressive feat.