Obscene Quest review Gary Roggin's Obscene Quest of Dr. Aardvarkbarf plays, mostly, as a wander-around-the-college-campus game; there's a little more to it than that, but not much. There are some funny moments, but on the whole here there isn't a lot here that the seasoned IF player hasn't seen many times before.

You are an assistant who was expelled from the university-- unfortunately for the game, since description after description keeps telling you about all the time you spend bemoaning your fate, long after it gets tiresome. (Mr. Roggin seems to have a certain, how shall we say, animosity toward university campuses, since we also get lots of messages about what a dreadful place this is. An archway is a "wrought-iron reminder of your failures," another building "blocks out the sun (and quite a bit of hope and humanity, too)." Er, it's one thing to get kicked out of a university, it's another thing to get pathological about it. Is all this necessary?) At any rate, you are sent to do an errand for Dr. Bignose--there are lots more silly names, unfortunately; the only one I found funny was a secretary named Bubbles--and stumble across his time machine in the process.

Actually, you stumble across plenty more; this game is overloaded with extra puzzles, puzzles not essential to finishing. I certainly didn't solve them, and I did try in several cases; they're either rather obscure or dependent on some knowledge or object that I missed. There's an appeal in that, in that the game is somewhat replayable, but it's also hard to focus on the main quest at hand because there are so many puzzles available (and it isn't immediately clear what to do to continue the main quest at many points anyway). If some of the extra puzzles had been integrated into the plot--and the game had given a bit more direction for the main story--this would feel a lot tighter. Moreover, several of the puzzles need a lot of work; doing the necessary things in the fountain took some guess-the-verb, and clumsy syntax for the ventilation shaft cover problem led me to believe I was doing the right thing when I wasn't. There's also some scenery-searching required--one bit of scenery reappears in Temple of the Orc Mage, actually, with the same object hidden in the same, well, ridiculous way. There's something labeled "fragile" that you break--but the means required to break it don't exactly befit a "fragile" object. There's even a locked object that you open without unlocking it--either you're very strong or the coding was a bit misleading. Most irritating of all, one "puzzle" (at least, a way of getting lots of points) has absolutely no point other than wanton destruction; the author may want us to share in his hatred for college campuses, but it feels just a tad gratuitous. (Moreover, another puzzle is an act of sheer vindictiveness against someone we have no real reason to dislike. You are playing a rather immature person, it seems.)

There are bugs aplenty. "Break" is poorly implemented--the game tells you "you'll have to tell me how to do that" if you try to "break" something, but "break [object] with [object]" elicits "I don't recognize that sentence." There is one room with essentially one piece of scenery and nothing else--but the game doesn't recognize that scenery if you try to interact with it. "Open desk" never works--you need to "open drawer"--though why there aren't the same thing isn't really apparent to me. You can't pick up the dish of "potpouri" (misspelled, not alone in that respect), for no obvious reason. "Climb" is unnecessarily clumsy--often, "up" and "down" aren't implemented and the game requires "climb" [object], which would be acceptable in 1983 but is not in 1997. An act that, shall we say, should alter the landscape significantly doesn't change the room description a bit. You are told not to open a panel, but nothing happens when you do--you can't see anything inside it. Perhaps there's a danger that you'll be bored to death. (Moreover, the most salient feature of the panel isn't mentioned in its description.) More generally, there are quite a few rooms and objects that appear to be useless, more than seems strictly necessary, though admittedly I didn't solve all the puzzles.

The writing is a bit uneven, though at times the sarcastic tone works well. The description of the fountain after your encounter with it is amusing, as is the experience of blundering into the juniper bushes--and even bits of the bemoaning-your-existence theme are funny (I enjoyed being told about "weeping into your microwaveable teabag," anyway). But there is one building that is "massive" from virtually every angle (and there are a lot of angles), there is a tree that "throws" shade, there are lots of typos and spelling errors, and generally there's a sense that some more proofreading would have helped. Still, writing of this quality does not bring down a game, and if the coding were cleaned up considerably, this would be passable even with grammar problems (they certainly aren't as significant as those of, say, Madame L'Estrange).

Obscene Quest isn't a terrible game by any means; there are some witty moments, and though the puzzles aren't earth-shatteringly original, they're reasonably well done. It's the other bits of the game, the parts that aren't puzzles but are vital to the game environment, that need plenty of work if this (or its putative sequel) wants to be turned into a viable entry. As it is, I gave this one a 5.