The Dink Network

Cast Awakening Part 1: Initiation

Either Dink's been Drinking or hes dreaming It was at that moment that Dink thought that maybe the quiet life would have been a better choice. Mwahaha!! I'm killing blobs with a loaf of bread!
January 5th, 2005
v1.0.2
Score : 9.2 exceptional
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SimonK
Peasant He/Him Australia
 
This is a very correctly named DMOD. Initiation, as a rite of passage usually involves some leve of pain or discomfort. At this DMOD has moments in which you will be frustrated, but at the same time I found it very addictive. I had to finish it, had to!!

Gameplay: An interesting mix of fighting and puzzles/riddles, with at most times a successful non-linear structure. I found a few areas really easy (such as the dancing - none of the arrows seemed to do more than 1 damage, so in the end I stopped dancing) and others really hard (like battling the tree monster) in which I had to spend quite some time levelling up back in the blue level fighting monsters before I could kill the tree thing. This was where a lot of the pain came in for me - the need to fight and fight to boost my levels. The non-linear aspect had other affects on gameplay - I finally found the Sabretrout weapon, but at that point it didn't seem to do much more than the hard bread - my weapon of choice.

Score 9.2

New Items/Magic - these abound in this DMOD and they work together well. The keys to unlock doors are good, the rancid meat and other assorted weapons were pretty goo to.

Score 9.5

Story: This is the weakest element to this DMOD. Dink is tricked into getting imprisoned by the Cast and must battle his way out of the stronghold

Score 7.0

Map: Good level structure with multiple access points for levels, only had one weird hardness thing with screenlocks and one of the Cast Fathers ending up on a green rock. But this bug is the fault of the Game Engine and not the author. Otherwise the attention to detail was great, as was the use of original and additional graphics. But a couple of the upper levels seemed sparse and bare - my only cricitism.

Score 9.5

Bugs: can't really comment about these as I was a Beta tester, and memories are reconstructions, so my memories of this game are based on both the beta and the final version. The final version seemed as bug free as the best of the DMODs.

Score 9.9

Bonuses:
Well I think the humour and the twists on old graphics and new was really well done. Also the end weird world was a nice mind twister - had to get Redink to help me with killing the hearts during the beta test. Coding on this DMOD is great. Use of the vine to suck life's blood from Dink via the status bar - yippee! Now I can see that's what Seth probably had in mind all along. Not to mention the voices used in the intro - new and freshing!

Score 9.9

So this is one of Redink's better DMODs, in fact his best one for me, as I had to play it, and play, and play it unitl I had gotten thru! It's biggest let down was the story, but that aside it's great!

Overall: 9.2