The Adventures of Rudolphine Rur narrates the adventures of a gnome who lives in an idyllic environment and who, due to circumstances, discovers that his brother Agostine is in a predicament, so he decides to undertake the journey in his search from the forest to the big city .

It is a very colorful and immersive game that has a very successful setting, with extensive descriptions of the locations that even contain several nods to the world of conversational adventures. The creator suggests a fantasy world that quickly immerses in the places and locations of the game, with great fluidity in the narrative that manages to escape the player into a bucolic and wild world.

I assure you that you become aware of the setting and that you are very small with the advantages and limitations that this entails.
The MSX2 version is in SCREEN 8, which allows us to enjoy some beautiful graphics, very well chosen (almost all have been extracted from the Yahoo image search engine) and they introduce you to the environment very well.

Regarding its gameplay, I have to say that, if you are an experienced player, it is sure to be easy for you to play it and find the right actions to advance the plot. I am not and it is an adventure that has been difficult for me to finish because I did not find the right actions. I personally believe that a novice would quickly quit this game.

I did not do it because I had the help of Invertigo to see if between the two of us we could find the correct actions to finish it. It should be noted that there are two commands that facilitate the player's progress, DETAILS (D) and HELP.
There have been things that we have found that did not make a lot of sense to us, but it is still because we have no experience in these types of games. One of them is that, when you start the adventure, you have to get down from the tree and we get stuck for a long time because we did not know how to do it. I wonder, you; the gnome, as the protagonist, don't you know how to get out of your own house? The solution is to find an umbrella, open it, and then jump into the void or clearing to get out of your treehouse. This doesn't make sense to us.

It is your house! How can you not know how to get out of your house?
Another thing that made us very desperate is that, in order to open the mailbox, you had to interact with a string, which kept it closed. We tried to use various objects such as the candle, the hammer and many others, however, despite the fact that there was an interaction on the part of the parser, the answers offered were desperate. Several examples of this are that we cannot burn the string with the candle, because it is fire retardant, that we cannot untie the string because we bite our nails and the knot is very strong or we simply cannot untie the knot with our teeth (a resource which is usually infallible). Finally, it is solved by cutting the string with a glass that you get in the greenhouse. It does not make any sense unless, in the description, we had been told that the string is magical or has some kind of enchantment, this would put us in context and we could discard other actions that are naturally understandable. Well look, that would make sense, but if you use everything and only the glass works, it is not very realistic and credible.

We both took several days, because we could not find the appropriate actions, so, while we were doing other things, if we came up with a new action, we would go back to the game window and try it, with the consequent motivation of having to make a review, since the temptations of abandonment were accused, especially and this is the most serious, all of them at the beginning of the game.
We strongly believe that many adventures are designed for experienced players, so that any novice who tries to play these games ends up abandoning them out of sheer helplessness and frustration.

This is one of those games that can suffer the evil of the exact sentence, because it goes from enjoying overcoming the obstacles that the plot proposes to us, to becoming a search to find the right verb that the author has come up with and this has us completely taken out of the context of the game, breaking the common thread that we were enjoying so much, since as we said before, the game, like a good novel, manages to abstract you into the fantasy world that the author proposes.

What we liked the least is the message that appears in the game when you use the verb USE: “USE is not an accepted verb. Please be more specific, what do you want to do, click, open, push, etc? "
You cannot use the key in the door, it must be "OPEN DOOR". Using glass with string does not work, it must be "CUT ROPE".
As a direct consequence of the explicit prohibition of the USAR verb, somewhat disconcerting situations are created, which are also recurrent throughout the two parts of the game. These are, that to resolve a conflict, you must carry the appropriate item in the inventory, but do not refer to it in order to
solve the problem.

For example: we have a stopper and a watering can with a hole… but we cannot use the stopper with the watering can; what we have to do is "COVER HOLE", but this action implies that we have the plug in inventory. Perhaps the correct verb would be plug hole, referring to the plug, since the player is thinking that he has a hole in the shower and a plug to fix it. Neither do the sentences fix a shower, but they do REPAIR SHOWER ... come on ... a tremendous mess that would be solved quickly by using a plug in a shower or using a plug in an orifice.
This happens in the same way with the greenhouse padlock, where we cannot use a hammer with a padlock, but neither can we hammer a padlock or hammer a padlock; that would refer to the object of the inventory, but HIT PADLOCK WITH A HAMMER or BREAK PADLOCK WITH A HAMMER. I sincerely believe that a good option would be, as a general trend for conversational adventures, to accept the verb USAR as one more resource and add synonyms for initiates who intend to spend the adventures. In this way, the layman is allowed to continue, avoiding attempts to quit the game, but at the same time, it would not stop posing a challenge for experienced users. Perhaps in this way, this type of adventure can reach a wider audience.

On the occasion of the review, we contacted the author to send him our impressions and we also made certain suggestions. The reception it has had and being aware of how hard it can be to receive criticism about his own creation, we can say that the author has given us good feedback, even going so far as to review the code, fixing several bugs that we had found during the game.
Although it is true that the impressions that we have reflected in this review have detractors and certain controversies of opinion have been generated with the author, he, of course, has made a defense of his position, nevertheless he has patiently listened to our point of view and we have even reached a consensus with some of our proposals.

Without a doubt, The Adventures of Rudolphine Rur is a conversation piece that is well worth enjoying as it contains a very original and attractive story. It is a beautiful game, very colorful and the story is beautiful. Highly recommended.

Efraím Sánchez-Gil.