IF Comp Review: The King and the Crown

[healyg]

Hello, all and sundry! For the next couple weeks I'm going to be reviewing a game from this year's IF Comp every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Up next, it's Wes Lesley's The King and the Crown.

The King and the Crown is a light puzzly story about a king searching for his lost scepter and crown. Though I initially struggled with this, finding them turns out to be pretty trivial, and the meat of the game is in discovering all the secret endings. Unfortunately (for me, anyway), most of the mechanics involved are deliberately obscured, which for me means it's a stab in the dark to get all of them. I checked the walkthrough to see how to get them, then figured that was enough for me.

Hmm, still need to talk for another paragraph... I did think the new parser errors were a nice touch, and the one secret ending I did manage to get (involving some daydreaming) I liked a lot better than the regular one.

Conclusion: An okay game, especially if you like secret-hunting and multiple endings, but you could probably do better.