0-star port of a really interesting piece of gaming history.
It takes a lot of skill to port an old text parser game and have it be worse than the original. The fuzzy matching means that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, and it's incredibly hard to figure out how or why. A less intelligent parser like in the original would have been easier to work with because at least it's predictable, and you can develop an internal model of how to talk to the game. Here, you're constantly guessing.
As a game, Portopia has the loose style of storytelling that a lot of early computer mystery games did. Modern players might find it offputting, but it works well and it's easy to see why it was such a big deal in 1983. The ludicrous ending twist is hard for players to guess, in a bad way, but overall it still lands.
It takes a lot of skill to port an old text parser game and have it be worse than the original. The fuzzy matching means that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, and it's incredibly hard to figure out how or why. A less intelligent parser like in the original would have been easier to work with because at least it's predictable, and you can develop an internal model of how to talk to the game. Here, you're constantly guessing.
As a game, Portopia has the loose style of storytelling that a lot of early computer mystery games did. Modern players might find it offputting, but it works well and it's easy to see why it was such a big deal in 1983. The ludicrous ending twist is hard for players to guess, in a bad way, but overall it still lands.