The Curious Four go to Black Devil Reef
Scott Macarthur - a health and safety inspector from Cumbria - has been sent to Kirrin Village to oversee some construction work on Kirrin Island. Scott's Aunt Fanny has kindly invited him and his friends Dave and Jon to stay at her cottage near the sea. His cousin Mike, who has been a bit grumpy recently, also lives there. Let's hope there are lots of adventures waiting for us!
Inspired by The ZX Spectrum game - Five on a Treasure Island by by Colin Jordan & Enigma Variations Ltd
Please report any bugs- and I'll get on them.
BIG SHOUT OUT TO ROBIN - He's developed an excellent tool for creating adventures - please check it out...
Made using Gruescript by Robin Johnson
AVAILABLE NOW!
Curious Four go to Black Devil Reef - the ebook! Check it out on Amazon
or get it free from my website!
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Comments
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For anyone else who gets stuck while playing
The Curious Four go to Black Devil’s Reef is an old-school style parser game (if you don’t know what that means, see this article) where you play as a group of friends and their dog who all go on a wild Lovecraftian adventure filled with surreal humor.
Since it’s an old-school style game, knowing what to do next and solving puzzles can feel a little vague or impossible in hindsight. For those of you (like me) who didn’t grow up on these games, you may be able to find hints in the accompanying eBook, which is short and fills in a lot of the narrative gaps in the game. The story may not make a whole lot of sense when you go through it, and that’s okay; it’s not supposed to.
Some bugs I found
These are hidden for new players’ convenience.
bug 1
When you hide under the bed when first entering the cottage, it triggers a game over event from the chase scene towards the end of the game.bug 2
After blasting Ms. Slattery from afar with the revolver, the game prevents you from going anywhere but the front door of the cottage. But I managed to by-pass this by entering the house and leaving through Uncle Quentin's study. I could go outside to the moors and also back to the church, where it triggered a game over event as if the cultists caught me.bug 3
Not sure if this is a bug, but I could only get 81% at most before Aunt Fanny comes at us all with the axe. It would be helpful to have a walkthrough, regardless.Compliments
Congrats on making a really customized Gruescript game. I liked how you mimicked traditional parser design and let the page expand instead of keeping previous text inside a small, scrollable window. And it was cool to see images in here, too! Did you hard code them into the file? IIRC Gruescript doesn’t support images by default.
Hi Bruhstin, many thanks for your comment and the bug report! I must admit the game is a bit bizarre, but it was mainly to get used to the gruescript system and experiment with my own customisations before I attempt a game with perhaps a bit more depth! Although Gruescript doesn't support images, it does support HTML so I was able to simply add a CSS class inside the room description and add the images as background images. Thanks again for your interest - and great website by the way!
Of course! And it’s all good, I enjoyed how out of left field the story and humor were. It reminded me a lot of the Venture Bros’ surreal style, especially since the Famous Five inspired the game.
Ahhh, I see! That’s a much cleverer solution than I would have thought of 😅. Thank you for sharing that! And I appreciate the compliment, I had a blast playing and reading The Curious Four.