Pintown review Pintown actually has a reasonably compelling premise: you wake up after a night of drunken revelry (okay, that's not particularly compelling), aware that you've been mean to your girlfriend in some way, and you resolve to find her and patch things up. Very little IF has dealt with relationships in any way, and it might have been interesting to see a game try. "Might have been" is operable here because Pintown suffers from several fatal bugs, including one that makes the game unfinishable (and, drat, the author didn't leave debugging mode on like lots of other authors did, so there's no way around the problem)--and even the segment you can play is shot with coding errors and design flaws.

The plot--well, it's hard to tell what it is, exactly, or what it would have become had the game been finishable, but your required actions as documented by the walkthrough are rather haphazard. As in, even after you have the initial premise, you do a number of unconnected things before actually doing anything related to that--in other words, guess what the author is thinking, repeatedly. (I defy anyone to guess what the walkthrough calls for you to do for the first 50 moves or so.) Even once you start doing things that are vaguely sensible, there are all kinds of plot holes--for one thing, you go back to your apartment, but you don't get a clue--at least, I didn't see one-- about where the silly thing is. You're told at the beginning that you're moving out, but you don't do anything related to moving out when you actually get to the apartment. There are lots of strange irrelevant details, such as some strange men "standing and crouching by the gate" and "doing something in some boxes that lie there." Maybe they prove relevant in the inaccessible portion of the game, but as it is, they're just there, and you can't interact with them or figure out what they're doing.

Pintown feels like the author needed perhaps another few weeks to work out the coding. You can "find" a door behind a curtain as many times as you like--you get the same message every time. When you're in a car, the game isn't very thorough about putting you there--you can pick things up, for instance. (It does, however, lend a bit of hilarity to the response "The cat runs away when you try to pick him up." Yeah, I'll bet, if you're picking him up by driving a car over him.) You can also throw things out of the van, whether the door's open or not (though you never actually get a reference to a car door--the van is open or closed.) Moreover, the defining flag seems to be whether the van is open, not whether you're sitting in it, so you can do everything you could ordinarily do in a setting without getting out of the van. It also seems like the author forgot to code some locations, since going certain directions in the car inevitably crashes the game. A character only follows you if you pose a directional command one way--if you type "out" rather than "south," he stays where he is. I could list more bugs, but it feels like piling on at this point. Certainly, the author deserves some credit for coding a vehicle--it does move, and move you and all your objects with it--but suffice it to say that Pintown doesn't exactly feel polished.

The author might want to consider redesigning some things if he decides to clean this up for another release. For one thing, some clue about what you want to do at any given moment--like, say, "You feel tired; you want to take a nap"--would help, since I didn't realize I was trying to do that until I saw it in the walkthrough. The NPCs should have some sort of interactivity--I couldn't get an intelligent word out of any of them. The kids-throwing- rocks scene shouldn't be infinitely replayable--they should get bored and do something else once you've convinced them to go away once, since otherwise you can make the game unwinnable. (Yes, I figured out the alternate solution. No, it doesn't make sense, unless these kids are REALLY BORED. You can still stumble into a third time.) There shouldn't be utterly cryptic scenes, like the one with the fellow on the street--yes, maybe it was resolved in the unplayable part, but it's still not cool to simply throw a strange scene at a player who won't understand it (especially when it's a puzzle and the solution is equally cryptic). And please, Mr. Blixt, don't let the game turn on taking a certain opportunity early in the game that lasts for two moves. That's just not nice at all, man.

I should reiterate that the general theme of Pintown--you wake up, hung over and feeling guilty, and resolve to clean up the mess that is your life--has lots of promise, honestly. This sort of thing appeals to me plenty more than treasure hunts at this point. And the prose really isn't bad, some spelling errors aside--the prologue is fairly well written, at least, though most of the room descriptions aren't much more than lists of exits. But in its current form, Pintown is too incomplete to give more than a 2.