Retro Fatale

Retro Fatale is Hexatona’s Game Gale 2010 entry. It takes the form of a traditional text-based adventure game, with all the frustration this implies.

It’s a premise familiar to anyone who grew up watching Captain N in the 90s; you have been sucked into the world of your video games! Except instead of being awesome, you are desperate to escape this unending nightmare. You are stalked every step of the way by your Nemesis, who has trapped you here and always manages to defeat you at the end of the game no matter how hard you try. But this time is going to be different. You’re done playing fair. It’s time to break out the strategy guide and exploit every glitch in the game. Your nemesis is going down.

Level Design 2/5:
As with many text adventure games, your greatest challenge will probably be getting the parser to understand just what exactly you want to do. You have several basic commands, the most important of which are “Examine” and “Search.” It is generally assumed that “Search” is more thorough than “examine,” or so suggests the game’s read me file, but which command reveals anything is actually fairly arbitrary. At one point I “Searched” a Shrubbery only to turn up nothing. “Examining” the same shrubbery revealed a secret entrance that my search apparently did not turn up. Other such minor annoyances include seeing a counter with nothing on it. “Examining” said counter reveals a box was on it that apparently was invisible except upon closer inspection. Sometimes you could only do some actions in a specific order. Other times you had to repeat the same action several times for results. By the end of the game, I finally realized who the mysterious "Nemesis" was; clearly it was The Parser.

But this is really more a problem with text adventures in general than anything having to do with this particular game.

Characters and Story 3/5:

Text adventures being entirely text, the writing is especially important, and the writing here is fairly competent. Dialogue is fairly minimal, though if you stand around long enough in certain areas you will often hear random people say various things that turn out to be useful hints if you are stuck. The main sources of entertainment come not from completing your quests but of asking bizarre questions of random people, and it is fun to see the various questions the developer programmed a response for. There is quite a bit of shameless pandering going on here (Hexatona clearly knows his audience) but for the most part it is amusing enough.

You’ll go through the fairly typical RPG arc in this game, from proving your worth to the king, fixing the broken bridge and even rescuing the princess. But throughout this quest you’ll also be searching for ways to turn this game to your advantage. You must seek out the exploits and bugs that will allow you to complete the game and finally free yourself from the Nemesis. It’s an amusing take on the genre.

Overall 2.5/5
Given this is Hexatona’s first experience with this software, it is not surprising that there are a few issues with the parser. But for the most part the writing is decent enough to make this an amusing adventure for text-game fans. The story is never breath-taking but the premise is amusing enough to keep you playing.