Incident at Karrousel Park is an exciting text adventure optimized for visually impaired players as well as people who can successfully drive cars like maniacs around S-curves.
Incident at Karrousel Park is a single player mystery game in which you search for someone you know: a wife, friend, whatever. You can play with whomever you choose to play with.
You were to meet your friend at Karrousel Park but you were delayed by an overturned semi. When you get to the park, however, you cant find your friend. You begin to learn that something bad may have happened to him or her.
You need to:
Search the park asking about your friend.
Learn as much as you can about the park.
Manage your funds and tokens wisely.
Distinguish friend from foe.
Avoid getting killed.
Find the one item other than cash or tokens you may need.
Gather the names of other persons of interest and ask about them also.
Find persons of interest.
Find your friend before he or she dies and figure out how to rescue him or her.
Figure out how to escape from the park.
Survive your escape plan.
Because this is a complicated game a list of clues youve received is kept for you in the game. (Not all sites youll visit in Karrousel Park are actually rooms but the convention in interactive fiction is to call them rooms. Here there are 430. You may not visit all of them in a single game.) The clues are not hints. The clues are a list of things youve learned in your search for your friend. And, just in case you need more help, there is a free downloadable PDF file on the karrouselpark.com website. This file may be printed or filled out on your computer and will help you keep track of every place youve gone and every person youve talked to. Not everyone will give you a clue, and not every site will provide information that will lead to your friends rescue and your mutual escape.
Incident at Karrousel Park is more in the style of The Consulting Detective Game than Infocom games like Deadline. There are no frustrating fights with the parser because you havent mastered the game creators weird style or sense of humor when you enter a reply. Nor are you offered set replies like a which-way book. In which-way books such replies often give too much away. Instead you are presented with reply keywords with which to form replies. As long as a reply keyword is used replies always work.
And you never need to start over again because you did not do something on time (In Deadline if you miss a phone call youve missed it and need to start a new game to get it. In Karrousel Park if it were important, the phone would ring, plausibly, when you were near it.) Even dying is easily corrected by a simple return, and you can even learn something by dying.
There is no unnecessary inventory. Throughout most of the game all youll need is cash and/or tokens to pay for rides and amusements.
There are no in-App purchases. In the game you start out with $7. You may buy a map set of the park or spend your money on tokens and rides, or even gamble. Since the map set may be essential in winning the game, there is an audio description of the maps for visually impaired players.
Incident at Karrousel Park is interactive fiction, the keyword being fiction. This is not a set of puzzles that constantly remind you, you are in fact playing a game.
This game immerses you in a fictional world where your goal is finding your friend. The world you play in is as realistic as possible.
David Curran is David Curran IV on imdb.com. He is a writer, producer, director who got his start as a writer with a story on the television series Wiseguy. His work has appeared in magazines like Louis lAmour Western Magazine, Writers Digest, and The Writer.
For visually impaired players the game begins in read-aloud mode. Which can be turned off for those who dont want or need it. Cursors always go back to the correct position so responses only need be entered.
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