Robb Sherwin is the author of the incredibly gloomy yet compelling superhero tale A CRIMSON SPRING, the ambitious retro-futuristic horror of NECROTIC DRIFT, the oddball sci-fi gumshoe story PANTOMIME, and the twisted semi-pornography of his debut CHICKS DIG JERKS. Playing any two of those reveals a startlingly clear and consistent authorial voice, which is in evidence again in his latest adventure CRYPTOZOOKEEPER.
As a courier of rare/undiscovered animals, you unwittingly become the target of an alien plot. Kidnapped and imprisoned, you make a daring escape with the help of some college friends and the use of a dna-splicing machine. A mysterious agent makes contact. She you access to a dna-splicing machine of your own, and makes a request for you to retrieve as much animal DNA as possible, then build and train a cryptozoological army to take on the aliens.
Downloading the hefty (by text adventure standards) 500MB package gives you a Hugo interpreter (yes, Hugo) and a data file. Load one with the other and you're up and running. Immediately you are greeted by multimedia! There is music! There are pictures! The pictures change! Yes folks, in 2011 we can now replicate what Magnetic Scrolls was doing in 1983. Progress! So, now understanding the reason for the file size, you can crank up the volume and sit back, absorbing some pretty damn good ambient techno beats, some with voice samples. There is a decent number of tracks, ensuring you won't be hearing the same number over and over in one session, and they do provide a great atmosphere that perfectly fits with the world of CRYPTOZOOKEEPER. Yes, you can switch the sound off, but you would be losing a large chunk of the experience without it.
The graphics are incredibly amateurish. That's not a criticism, considering it is amateur i.e. unpaid. Sherwin has righly figured out that he's not going to be competing with MYST in the photo-realism department so has decided to emphasise the deliberately ramshackle homebrew feeling of the production by badly digitising photographs of his friends and family and mashing up pictures off the net. This leads to some golden visual gags. The Beast of Bodmin, for example, is represented by a portrait of an Asian girl (who I assume is an ex-girlfriend) - a non-sequiteur in-joke at her expense that is just mindlessly funny.
Like all his previous games, CRYPTOZOOKEEPER is jam-packed with allusions to pop culture, witty dialogue and a parade of slacker characters. His worlds are dark and unpleasant, yet filled with humor at every turn. His characters feel alive, with a sense that they continue to lead their lives both before and after the events in the game. It feels unlike any other text adventure, as if Sherwin has developed the game while remaining totally isolated from the modern "interactive fiction" community. This means that, for once, you are not a lonely NPC, wandering around an empty unpopulated world, finding scraps of "diaries" to uncover the backstory (because of your amnesia, natch). From the outset, you are meeting PCs, having long conversations (through a somewhat clumsy keyword-based conversation system), and many of these guys will actually join you, accompanying you for long swathes of the adventure. What's more, these characters are pretty dynamic, reacting to, and speaking about, your actions and the events going on around them. This isn't like dumb chatbots, spouting "quips" randomly and irrelevantly, this is actual conversation. Neither is it a glorified "hint system", nobody is talking about how you should be using the green key on the green door, they are far more likely to be insulting each other or the player-character. Yes, these are characters who are not necessarily "united by a common goal", but actually have antagonism towards each other. How often have you ever seen things like this in a text adventure game? It's the total oppposite of the prevalent mode of "PC-Centred" game design, i.e. the world is a static toybox that only comes to life in the presence of the PC, the story progresses only through the action of the PC, and, like Zaphod Beeblebrox, the world only exists for the convenience of the PC. Sure, CRYPTOZOOKEEPER still follows this mode deep underneath, but it does a great job, better than any other text adventure I can think of, at hiding it on the surface.
Gameplay-wise, CRYPTOZOOKEEPER is a bit more traditional. There are puzzles, although only three of them are particularly taxing. One of these, annoyingly, is the very first puzzle in the game. Don't be put off, things get a whole lot better after this. The usual text adventure skills of reading everything carefully and examining everything pay off. Other puzzles can be solved with the use of a new "secondary examine" verb: SCAN. And talking to everybody about everything will pretty much resolve the rest. There are nuisances. Guess-the-verb rears its ugly head from time to time, there are some glaring spelling errors, and an insane bug where you can literally skip an entire imprisonment-and-escape sequence of the game by choosing to walk east to the alien's house instead of northeast the shack. If you're familiar with any of Sherwin's previous games, these kinds of implementation issues will be no surprise, its obviously the aspect this author is least interested in.
I should close by mentioning the mini-game: CRYPTOZOOKEEPER implements an entire Pokemon-style monster-rearing RPG. Create your animals in the splicer, take them to fight in barbaric animal-battles at a local bar, raise their stats, let them rest for a while when their hit points get low, rinse and repeat. What purpose does this serve? Very little. There is one boss-battle where all your level-grinding proves useful, but outside of that is is entirely irrelevant. The battles themselves are hands-off, they play out by themselves without any strategic decisions from you, other than deciding if you want to end the battle every three turns. Why is it here? No idea. But, again, if you're familiar with Sherwin's previous work, you will be used to this kind of nonsensical idiosyncrasy. Think of it as the author's personal stamp of authenticity.
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