Bonehead game

The game recounts a famous screw-up that defined the career of Fred Merkle. From the outset, in no uncertain terms, you're informed that the disaster is coming and that it will scar your life. Yet you still keep working towards it, through a difficult commute and an indecipherable morass of baseball terminology.

The game is broken up by flashbacks that imply the main story is just a flashback. There are obvious debts to Photopia and A World's Fair Mystery ; one could choose worse models. It seems diligently researched. Bonehead has a number of conflicting, emergent morals, some of which the author certainly didn't intend. The point could be that Merkle was a clueless blunderer, only barely holding on moment to moment, and some horrible mishap was inevitable; this comes out of gameplay, and contradicts statements that Merkle was actually pretty savvy.

Another is that Merkle is a sort of sticktoitive hero, unable to give less than his all even when it leads to his destruction; this feeling hangs around the story even though it makes no chronological sense.

Another, probably closer to the intent, is that even solidly competent people fuck up all the time; whether a fuck-up goes unremarked or haunts you your entire life is largely a matter of luck.

Bonehead 's main flaw is a tendency to cheesiness that it can't quite sustain; there's that historical-fiction thing where you always meet significant historial figures who are just now thinking about something that will ring down the ages, and there's a Hollywoodish moment of Touching Redemption.

Overall, though, a really strong debut. You play Fred Merkle, a player for the Giants in , who was famous for a mistake he made that year. You are taught about baseball in the game, including how to catch and how to hit the ball.

There is a lot of simulation-based information in the game they tell you exactly what to do for different types of pitches , and so I thought that most of the puzzles would be simulation-based. However, at least two of the puzzles are traditional parser puzzles. I enjoyed the writing and graphics, and it made the game come alive to me. The chatter of the crowd, the words of the people around you, really transport you to the past.

Great for fans of baseball, history, simulation games, or a good story. I wanted to enjoy it because I think empathy and the ability to learn from a time and place are great strengths of the IF medium and I'm still firmly on the author's team, as it were , but having to participate in certain character interactions felt like a chore, there came points where it's necessary to perform specific unintuitive actions using unfamiliar language the bag situation, specifically , and while the early puzzles were straightforward distract Person A to retrieve Item B , the walkthrough carried me through the awkward final stage which I felt was unplayable otherwise.

Baseball aficionados or historians may feel differently, and there are two deeper and altogether more complementary reviews available by Emily Short and Jimmy Maher at the time of this writing. For the rest, there's always Wikipedia. Home Browse. Log In. Download Bonehead. To play, you'll need a glulx interpreter - visit Brass Lantern for download links.

Compressed with ZIP. Free Unzip tools are available for most systems at www. ClubFloyd transcript. Bonehead by Sean M. Bonehead release 2 now available March 6, An updated release of Bonehead is now available on the IF archive. This release contains several bug fixes and new responses inspired by playing the game with ClubFloyd. See the full review. Log in to add your own tags Edit Tags. Delete Tags. Was this review helpful to you? Learn to make potions that allow you to survive and thrive in a dynamic, open-ended game world.

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