[u]Recommendation[/u]: A satisfying adventure game for fans of the genre, with a few frustrations.
[u]Review[/u]: Johnny Bonasera wants revenge on some punks who've ruined his sandwich (not to mention they beat him up, too). So he declares a vendetta and goes about repaying them in kind: discovering what is most precious to each of them, and then destroying that thing. It's a pretty elementary adventure game that doesn't take too long to play, and so you achieve the satisfaction of doing everything and completing the game pretty quickly. But it is also an elementary adventure game because there's not a lot to do, and only one path that will take you to the end. So there's some amount of frustration in trying to guess what the correct solution is: performing each action in the arbitrarily correct order to be successful even though what you need to get Johnny to do is very clear. So that can be frustrating, but the frustration doesn't last too long, because the game is pretty small: there are five locations in total.
[u]Critique[/u]: The earliest adventure games came out at around the same time as Choose Your Own Adventure game books were created. In a Choose Your Own Adventure book, you read text about a location and a situation that's happening there. Then you are presented with a number of choices what to do next: do you go to the north side of the house, do you look in the mailbox, or do you climb through the window? With each choice was a page number, that you would go to when you chose that option. They graph very easily as decision trees, usually with multiple possible endings. Adventure games are pretty similar (and visual novels, which came much later, are even more similar). In both, a big part of the challenge is in intuiting what the correct path is, because as a reader/player, you are operating under incomplete information. Of course, you don't what what is going to happen until you make a choice and follow that path, but aside from that, the chief area of ignorance you have is the author's mind. You don't know what the author was thinking! So when you are faced with a troll, even though you may have many ideas on how to interact with the troll, you don't know what ideas the author had, or which idea the author thought would result in success. So what usually happens is you choose the option that you think makes sense, and then, if your thought process matches the author's, you progress further in the story. But if your thought process doesn't match - you thought of a possibility the author didn't, or the author felt that that choice was inferior to another - you don't advance. In some cases (like most of the early Sierra adventure games), if you make the wrong choice, your character dies and the game is over. So either you get into a similar headspace as the game's author (at which point you make more and more of the correct choices), or you end up having to make blind guesses to advance.
Thankfully, [u]The Revenge of Johnny Bonasera[/u] is more forgiving than the old Roberta Williams games (you can't die as Johnny), but you don't have any more information. Unlike the Tim Schaffer adventure games from Lucasarts, there's not much care given to make sure that when you do the correct things, the game will advance, no matter what order you do those things. So you end up with a HUGE amount of frustration in the game, because there's only one correct sequence of actions that you must take to proceed in the game. An example: in one sequence, you have to present a fake ID. In order to do that, you have to get someone else's card, remove their picture from the card, talk to a guy, get a pen, draw a replacement picture, and then present the fake ID. That's already very specific, but get this: to remove the picture from the card, you just need to look at it. But if you look at the card on any screen/in any location other than the correct one, you won't remove the picture! So when I first get the card, I looked at it, and the game told me about the card. And in most cases it doesn't matter where you are when you look at an item; as makes sense, the item doesn't change just because you walked down the block. So when I got to the screen with the guy, I kept trying to hand him the card - it was obvious that I needed his help to create the fake ID - but he wouldn't take it, because I hadn't looked at it again in his presence first.
This is just one example. This sort of thing happened four or five times in the game. What it meant for me is that by the end I was no longer trying to solve puzzles; instead I was methodically looking at every item in every location, then methodically trying every item on every other item/character, one after the other. It made the game - which is otherwise short and thus fun - become a real chore.
I still like the game, but it's obvious that the author and I don't think much alike, and you have to think more like him to be able to comfortably navigate the game and its puzzles.
