Review of "Four Mile Island" Review of "Four Mile Island"Four Mile Island is a MS-DOS interactive fiction game written with Basic and is © 2002 by Chris Charla.
Review by David Welbourn
I can understand being nostalgic for older games like those written by Infocom or Sierra. But I can't understand being nostalgic for homebrews like this game appears to emulate. Even back then, this is what we played only when we were desperate for a text adventure, any text adventure. Today, we can do better than that. And hey: here we are again, walking into a dangerous situation without any equipment, forcing us to do a scavenger hunt in enemy territory before we can deal with the real issues.
Bother. The rooms and object descriptions are minimal. The parser is minimal. The NPC keeps flitting in and out without any actual presence. Having to say "access north" and "access south" all the time is a pain. There's a maze. The puzzles are dead simple, except for the last puzzle... and that's when you learn that the game doesn't support "save" and "restore". Ugh.
Rating: 2.