This is a 2009 game made by Dave Gilbert as a contract job, so it's a bit of a mixed bag. It's aimed at casual gamers, so there are lots of tutorial pop-ups and 'WOW you picked up a piece of paper!' pop-ups with loud dings and sparkle effects and what have you. In some ways it feels a bit cheap - the walking speed is too fast for the animation, the VO quality is fairly low, the UI all looks really cheap, stuff like that - but it does have a fair few custom animations, it looks alright, and it started off with a fun action sequence with the Lion, a dastardly corrupt lawyer in this version, throwing you off a high bridge. And I've already chuckled a couple of times - to be honest I think I'm currently enjoying it more than the Blackwells!
Dave Gilbert VO watch side-corner: Dave has already appeared, playing a flying taxi gump-couch! (I guess the makeshift gump-couch from TMLOO was the inspiration for an entire industry, and someone is going around chopping gumps' heads off then attaching them to sofas and sprinkling powder of life on them and enslaving them?)
I'm about a third of the way through now (it's much bigger than I guessed, thought I'd be basically done with it by now!), and it's still fairly charming. Very rough around the edges though (not least of all that it locked my PC when I quit, so I had to ctrl-alt-del and restart), and some fun puzzles but also it's a detective game and so it has the old conversation spiral going too. Not that Dave has ownership to do this of his own volition, but I'm wondering to myself if he could make some money in the modern adventure game market by doing a quick remaster and selling it for a couple of quid. I reckon with a little bit of effort it could do quite well. Perhaps knock out yearly sequels, nice steady earner.
One amusing thing I spotted: in the University of Oz, there are two busts in pride of place side by side - one of Frank L Baum and one of Dave Gilbert! He did make sure to have Petra say that she owes FLB everything and DG is unimportant, but still, not sure I'd have the brass cojones to do something like that!
Okay, finished it. If anything, it was a bit too long! Pretty good fun when you're meeting weird people and cleverly using magic spells to defeat froggy extortionists or win an arena duel against Mumbi, and getting yourself turned into a hat stand or whatever, less so when when you're just bouncing back and forth between two characters and clicking the new dialogue options until the job is done, or when you're sitting through lore dumps or Dramatic Writing that needed to be cut in half. Very easy as well, I rarely had to stop and think. But, with all the caveats, not bad.
Rating: a very rough diamond, but fairly charming and fun
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