City Quest

No matter what genre of gaming you're used to, you'll find something enjoyable here. It has a certain comedic style making it lovable ^^. 9/10 would lick shop window again

Garbage. My Score - 1/10

Like this game, not bad

Odd sense of humor and graphics that reminds me of old Sierra games. Fun.

Nope

City Quest is the funniest game I've played in a long time, and perhaps in years. It boasts stellar comedic writing and, despite the game's deliberately prehistoric graphics, even some great visual gags. For true fans of comical adventure games like Leisure Suit Larry, this is a must-play. The game includes cameos by characters from classic adventure games and other pop culture media; I'm tempted to give examples, but that would spoil them. Gameplay is mostly standard point-and-click adventure fare, but for an adventure game, City Quest gives you an unusual amount of freedom. You can wander around doing things and talking to people that have nothing to do with your story arc, and it is truly YOUR story arc: in the beginning of the game, you decide on a career as either a prostitute, a gangster, a political crony, a hobo, and so on. This sets you on a certain track for the rest of the game, but you can still wander around all the areas that you would've had to explore if you'd chosen a different path. The chief enjoyment from this game comes from laughing at its nameless, hopelessly clueless country-bumpkin protagonist. In even the most seemingly mundane, pointless environmental interactions, he inevitably finds something hiliarious and stupid to do; for example, you might assume that clicking the hand icon and then clicking a tree would trigger an attempt to climb. Instead, the "hero" is more likely to either romance the hapless tree or try to fight it. Even funnier are the descriptions borne from using what I initially thought was the speech icon. Although the icon is indeed used to speak with the game's colorful cast of characters, you never quite know what it will do when used on objects in the environment. Your quasi-braindead champion might yell at a stop sign, inexplicably slap his face against a window, or perform what I can only describe as "oral favors' on iron-rod fencing. This, of course, is all when he isn't trying to taste whatever random object is in his path--because this guy wants to eat all kinds of things that should never, ever enter a human face. He will gobble everything from garbage to adult toys, and this oral fixation at one point leads to one of the best visual gags in the game. (Hint: try eating everything in your inventory, but be sure to save your game first!) While most of City Quest's environmental interactions are described in text, rather than by the character taking visible action, this is actually a huge plus for the game: it creates one opportunity after the next to show off the writer's unusual gift for comedy, and allows for far greater flexibility than if the game relied on its simplistic graphics for communicating humor to the player. My constructive criticisms are minor, and most are, in a sense, not even criticisms. I'll explain this shortly. There are some typos in the text, and while they aren't nearly prolific enough to pose a significant problem, their semi-regular appearance--moreso in some game areas than others--can at times be distracting. The game's graphics appear almost as an afterthought, primitive to the point of being shocking at first, and it takes a bit of time to overlook them. Finally, as a first-time player, it didn't seem clear in the beginning that I was choosing a game path. This part of the game is handled by completing quests for various characters (such as a hobo, a prostitute, and a politician) on a city block that acts as a preliminary game area; once you complete all of the quests for a given character, they offer you a job in their "profession," and agreeing to the offer sets you on your unique course. As such, you really only need to complete quests for one character--whichever one can enable the choice you want. However, this wasn't obvious to me, so I unnecessarily ran around doing things for all of the characters before one of them eventually offered me a job (as a prostitute, for the record). That being said, only the typos can truly be considered design flaws, while the other issues are merely results of judgment calls on quandries that have no perfect solution. And, in my opinion, they were the correct calls to make. While the visuals may be remarkably simple, I suspect this was a compromise that allowed the tiny staff at Stone Monkey Studios to focus on creating an otherwise excellent game. And make no mistake: the time and effort saved on graphical development is lovingly invested into the rest of the experience, and especially into its brilliant comical writing. Furthermore, the stone-age graphics fit well with the absurdity of the game as a whole, and a cutting-edge engine would honestly have detracted from the game's humor and charm. As for the conceptual murkiness of the early game, this succeeds in immersing the player early into the cartoonish world of City Quest, whereas flashing an on-screen explanation of how the path-choosing mechanic works would have felt out-of-place. Moreover, it is absolutely worth it to engage with all of the characters in this preliminary stage, especially if you only play the game once; you will never get to talk to them again after choosing your course, and all of this early dialogue is worth seeing and enjoying before you move on. Overall, City Quest is a should-play title for fans of the adventure genre, and a categorical must-play for lovers of comedic adventures specifically. If series like Leisure Suit Larry, Sam & Max, and other humor-centric point-and-click titles appeal to you, this irreverent and endearing effort by Stone Monkey Studios would be tragic to miss. If you start to grow weary from the dated visuals, or from pointing and clicking on everything with every icon--which you'll want to do, lest you miss out on a good joke--just save your game and pick it back up the next day. I assure you you'll get right back into the flow of things as you yell, lick, and munch your way to one of the game's many possible conclusions. Bravo, Stone Monkey Studios.

As a fan of old school point and clicks, I can appreciate City Quest for what it is: A crass homage to old school adventure games and the gritty urban living of 2000 based organised crime movies. Highly recommended if you, like me, enjoy the odd bit of brain teasing and toilet humour, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Onr0lHEfeLM&list=PLPdNBrvCfkRMWhmPQ8jzzCZaT5K-P-olv