Put away the reality you've known: you won't be needing it on this trip.
One minute you're just a guy eating nacho-flavored popcorn. The next you're sucked through a TV into a fantastic alien world filled with exotic landscapes and lifeforms. Welcome to the strange destiny of P. J. Barrett.
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Windows 7 / 8 / 10, Pentium 4 or later, 256 MB RAM, Athlon 64 or later, 10 MB available space...
Description
Put away the reality you've known: you won't be needing it on this trip.
One minute you're just a guy eating nacho-flavored popcorn. The next you're sucked through a TV into a fantastic alien world filled with exotic landscapes and lifeforms. Welcome to the strange destiny of P. J. Barrett.
Follow P.J. through a marvelous realm of acid pools and frags, quirls and fluboxes, floaters and wraiths. There's a deep mystery here that only he – with your help – can solve.
Encounter dozens of alien lifeforms on your journey to save the universe.
Unravel multiple layers of intriguing puzzles and solutions.
Immerse yourself in a hauntingly beautiful soundtrack with more than 25 songs.
Explore over 90 screens filled with vibrant colors and surprising animation.
Choose from point-and-click or arrow-key navigation at your choice of game speed.
Interact with the world through a text parser that recognizes full sentences and more than 1,500 words.
Have NOT bought this intriguing title yet, but wanted to note that DosBox DOES have controls for CPU cycles, allowing the user to speed up or slow down a game. To slow down emulation speed, decrease cycles by CTRL-F11, to speed up/increase with CTRL-F12. You might want to try the Turbo button ALT-F12, just be careful with it as I've had some games develop glitches when Turboing too often.
https://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Special_Keys
The Game itself is a nice Sierra Style Adventure. You can Die in different ways nearly in every Screen. The Story is still quite nice, and the Graphics are good for an 1990 Game
But the Game is very Critical with CPU Cycles, so the DOSBox cant play this game correctly, you will get massive Sound Problems. Its nearly unplayable because of them. Even the DOS Original had this Problems. It runs Smooth on a 286 or 386SX, but if you run it on a 386DX or Faster you get the Same sound trouble. Back than you could Push your Turbo Button to make the Computer Slower, but that dont work on Modern Systems or in the DOSBox.
its a shame no one did a Quality check here.
PROS
- It's like Space Quest but much, much weirder. Floating islands, weird creatures, a labyrinth of cheese (not really). There's a lot of variety.
- Not only is the world is filled with wonder but you are free to explore it.
- It is based on DOSBox and not ScummVM which guarantees that your authentic experience won't be tarnished with newly introduced game breaking bugs that some of the more complex adventures ported with ScummVM, have.
CONS
- The game exemplifies everything people dislike about parser adventures - rigid parser that doesn't take into account many of the ways in which you can phrase something; navigating labyrinthian paths over deadly pits with extremely unwieldy controls, etc. This is mostly a design problem because other similar games aren't so unfairly annoying.
- The main problem of the puzzles is not that they don't make sense (most of them do) but that there's no feedback when your attempts are rejected. When the character tells you "I can't climb this" it doesn't mean he can't climb this, it means that he won't climb this instance of it in this particular spot. Without the spoilery screenshots above I wouldn't have guessed how some of the puzzles are solved. Same for "I can't push this" or "I can't cut this" - yes he can, it just doesn't apply to this particular rock or tree. Similarly, it turns out that the NPCs want gifts from you that they never even hint at being interested in.
- At the time when I played the game didn't have the original manual included. Instead, the players get one page of obvious statements that have been written very recently. This means that the players will miss some lore, a map, instructions about verb shortcuts and keyboard combinations for easier typing that can't be guessed (such as L-look, AB - ask about, Ctrl-X, Ctrl-D, etc.). You should try to find the manual online.
VERDICT
I liked the game a lot despite its problems because I really like this type of games. It was fun and engaging to explore.
Very old-school parser / graphical adventure game. Sort of similar to Sierra's early AGI adventure games (like Kings Quest) but set in a much more surreal world.
The best thing about the game is its wonderfully imaginative world and the great pixel art used to show it. This must be some of the nicest EGA graphics ever.
There's a lot to explore, but getting through it requires real persistence. I made a serious attempt to complete the game without any hints, which meant spending a lot of time and effort on the puzzles. It took me weeks, but I managed to solve most of it on my own.
For the last parts I had to 'cheat' and consult the hint book — and I’m glad I did. One puzzle relied on such obscure phrasing that I would never have come up with the solution myself. Another challenge seemed nearly impossible, and in hindsight, it may have been a form of copy protection, as part of the solution was hidden in the manual’s tutorial.
In conclusion, this could have been a small gem. Unfortunately, it felt too unpolished and, quite frankly, too difficult to be really enjoyable.
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