Review of "Scary House Amulet!" Review of "Scary House Amulet!"Scary House Amulet! is a Z-code 5 interactive fiction game written with Inform 6 and is © 2002 by Ricardo Dague.
Review by David Welbourn
My. Someone likes boldface and exclamation marks, don't they?
This is a very silly game. There's a grand total of four rooms in the house, and approximately eight locations for the each of the driveway, forest maze, and cave maze areas. That means that more than half the game is in a maze. And it's all punctuated with statements like "There is a monster here!! It is scary!!!" Yeesh.
Anyway, two of the scary house monsters are pleasantly chatty enough that you can figure out what to do – which is to defeat or placate all the monsters, of course – provided that you can first scavenge enough tools to do the job.
Although the game more-or-less works, boldface and exclamation marks are no substitute for narrative, and game feels both childish and empty as a result. And it's not the least bit scary. (Although the author does manage to nicely convey just how vile they think Pepsi is.)
Rating: 3.