Review Dry Gulch Developer: Michael Zerbo Publisher: inebooks.com Genre: Adventure Release Date: 2005 Platform: , Palm OS, Pocket PC Review by Alexander Tait April 27, 2005		Buy this game at Trade for this game at:

In some regards, I am a newbie in the world of adventure gaming. One of the first titles I bought for PC was Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh and FMV with real actors was what attracted me in the first place.

However, in another world many people call “The Eighties”, I had used an Apple IIc, and later an Apple IIe, and later still an early Macintosh. On the early Apples, I had enjoyed a text game called Dracula, but truth be told, I was pretty awful at it. I have a lot of admiration for people who play text adventures when there exists the more dynamic graphic adventure. On some levels certainly, a text adventure requires a different kind of lateral thinking to the graphic adventure.

So what does the rambling ruminations of one person have to do with Dry Gulch? Following the success of The Murderer, creator Michael Zerbo has gone for something different in his latest title. He may have created, or at least added to, a new genre of adventure game. Part text adventure, part choose your own adventure, and part graphical adventure with sound, it is hard to say what this is!

One thing I immediately thought when I played it was that it could be a bridge for newbies that could carry them to the world of text adventures. Dry Gulch is a text adventure with a few pictures and a few sounds thrown in. It simplifies the concept, though, by giving choices at each screen. Instead of having to think of an action to type, the scope of choices are on the screen. This may sound like a choose-your-own-adventure style ebook but, in fact, some choices are only listed after other events have been carried out previously. For example, a room that is locked cannot be entered but after a key is found, a choice of trying the key is given.

This simplification makes the game easy and my five-year-old son who loves reading thought this was sensational. He enjoyed being able to choose where he went easily. Although he could not complete the puzzles without some assistance, it demonstrates the scope of adventure game appropriateness. It is unlikely that most parents would have concerns about their children playing many adventures, text or otherwise. Many might even encourage them to play adventures that encourage lateral thinking and problem solving without mindless violence, incessant shooting, and a total absence of intelligent storyline.

The story is a tried and true Western type. Your brother has gone missing so you arrive at Dry Gulch to investigate his disappearance. You interact with characters and items through boxed “hotspot” words on the screen rather than the incidental graphics. As mentioned above, some options are not available until an event has occurred i.e. you could not ask someone about a topic until you had heard something about it from someone else.

The screen is small and occupies about a third or a quarter of the monitor. The reason for this is that it was designed for PDAs with their small screens. I have never been a fan of small screen as I feel it detracts from the immersion but as there were few sounds and only small static pictures, the suspension of disbelief was never there anyway.

The game is about an 8 MB download and one of several titles available from inebooks. Michael’s game is the most adventure-ish to date. Other titles follow the “Choose your own adventure” structure more. The game is downloaded and allows a brief period of play before requesting an activation code. The code relates to an ID code that is individual to each computer. Once downloaded and entered, the game can be played to completion. The game is only available by download and does not come on a CD-ROM. In the future, the games from inebooks may be available for mobile phones also.

For those unfamiliar with graphical or text adventures, there is a hints section in Dry Gulch that explains how these kinds of games are played. The game auto-saves on exit and will automatically return the player to the last position in the game when the game is begun again. Alternatively, the game uses save points at regular intervals that can be used as positions to return to the game.

Except for one point in the game, there are no dead ends. Michael has since corrected this error as the game is intended to always allow the player an option to continue the story. There are, however, places where the player can die, usually related to poor choice of action, such as doing something without checking safety first or acting without considering other options. The amount of backtracking when these deaths occur is minimal and it is far less frustrating than most other adventures that have dying in them.

I am not a big fan of text adventures but I played it all the way through, so this says something. I noticed the occasional word/grammatical error (e.g. “a might peculiar”) but, for the most part, it was simple but adequately constructed writing.

The game was very easy overall but not boring. I didn’t like having to scroll down to read all the text but this may relate more to my ambivalence toward text adventures than any design flaws. It only takes about an hour to play all the way through so it will not occupy a PC adventurer’s time particularly well. However, anyone looking for a non-action title to play on the go could do worse than looking into this title.

This game deserves about a C. It’s nothing special, reasonably solid but brief entertainment. Dry Gulch is novel in its game design but not so radical as to turn the world on its ear.

Final Grade: C
(find out more about our grading system)