A parody of amateur adventure design, this metagame consists of a simple treasure hunting game, and a complex editor needed to complete it. The editor and its assistant Cuppit are all part of the game; anyone involved in game or level design should appreciate the humor.
The editor is an exercise of twisted logic and lateral thinking. You have to see it to believe it; with its offbeat controls, inventory items that kill you, and intentional misspellings, it’s the weirdest thing since sliced bread!
META is based on Adventure Game Studio, the platform for most of our games, and is runner-up for two AGS Awards.
Title: META
Author: Crystal Shard
URL: https://crystalshard.net/?g=4
Date: 2005
License: ?
I wonder whether this game has affected the “fix the bugs” genre – titles like Pony Island, to be exact.
2025-04-06 The First Try#
My first experience sure was frustrating. I think META perfectly captures the rage, helplessness and confusion which arise when you want to do something supposedly simple in a new software, but none of its features seem to even remotely do what you want. Add to the mix an incredibly annoying unhelpful helper, and you are on a right way to create the next videogame masterpiece, the legend, the Awesmoe (sic!) Game.
Well, the TVTropes page has already warned me: “Expect lots of out-of-the-box thinking and meta-solutions.” Ugh.
I haven’t replayed Pony Island in a while, but I remember it to be more… Straightforward and way less confusing. Another important point is that in Pony Island the player has to fix a game made by someone else (namely the Devil himself) and in META the player is the Awesmoe Game creator. Fixing the old project which you don’t remember making – and of course don’t remember how to use the editor in which the game in question was created – is a frustrating experience as well.
Even if I don’t return to this game anytime soon, I think it’s a good idea to reflect on aforementioned issues, since I encounter them a lot when I try to find a brand new perfect personal knowledge management setup only to abandon it in a few weeks.