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)