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Progress Quest

Moby ID: 20741
Windows Specs

Description official description

In what some might dub the logical conclusion of the statbuilding RPG genre, Progress Quest is a game that plays itself. Stripping away the flashy and distracting bells and whistles of things like graphics and sound, automated gameplay consists of three simple phases, stock components of any game in its genre: 1) going into the killing fields to slay monsters; 2) returning to town to sell plunder looted from the monsters' corpses; and 3) using the resultant lucre to upgrade one's equipment, so as to more effectively facilitate the efficient slaughter of further monsters. Abstracting things away from even a nominal Nethackian 2D textmode depiction, Progress Quest instead represents all these goings-on as a series of progress bars, gradually but irrevocably filling up until they tick over and place checkmarks in task boxes.

Effectively a monotonous, game-themed screen saver with all the excitement of watching your hard drive defragment, developer Grumdrig has nonetheless instilled a great deal of subtle complexity into this title, it randomly generating enough missions of common types (Deliver, Seek, Exterminate, Placate) to keep the avatar diligently questing while the player eats, sleeps, or works, occasionally checking in to monitor the "fire-and-forget" game's progress. An impressive array of creative spell, treasure and equipment types await the stalwart player willing to invest the CPU cycles needed for the long haul -- as with Kingdom of Loathing, the pseudofantasy proceedings are tempered with a certain quantity of whimsy (available races, for instance, including the Panda Man, Land Squid and Enchanted Motorcycle, while class types include Puma Burglar, Tickle-Mimic and Tongueblade).

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Credits (Windows version)

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Reviews

Critics

Average score: 61% (based on 2 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.1 out of 5 (based on 21 ratings with 1 reviews)

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The Good
Simple, amusing little diversion -- almost hard to call it a game, though there is some interaction at the beginning. Fans of RPGs be entertained by the various descriptions of items ("+32 Custom Impressive Diamond Mail"), monsters ("Beef Giants"), spells ("Cone of Annoyance"), etc....

The game also has an online component, whereby your character's statistics are periodically uploaded to the servers of the realm you choose to play in, and you can see how you stack up against the other players. You can also join a guild in the online version, though I haven't seen what impact that has on the game itself.

The Bad
The only real gripe I have is that advancing in levels gets significantly slower the higher up you get. While not unheard of on its own, I have noticed that once I reached level 60 or thereabouts, my character seems to only gain one level every couple weeks.

Not that it affects my life in any way whatsoever, though, since sometimes I even forget I have the game running. It's just kind of annoying when I do remember and check on it.

The Bottom Line
Interesting to watch on the screen, though gets a bit repetitive after a little while. More fun to just leave running on a computer somewhere and periodically check in on. (If you play the online version, you can check your progress using a web browser.)

Windows · by Mirrorshades2k (274) · 2007

Discussion

Subject By Date
A curious side benefit Pseudo_Intellectual (67148) Jun 28, 2007

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  • MobyGames ID: 20741
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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Pseudo_Intellectual.

Additional contributors: Sciere.

Game added January 14, 2006. Last modified February 22, 2023.