Playful, heartfelt, full of wonder – Nocked! Review

Update for 1.5: Love the woods (Viking ship! Toad gifts!) and the new Palamedes story. A couple minor glitches I saw in the Castle infiltration section seem to be resolved. --- This game gambols through every version of Robin Hood you could wish, alternately merry and serious, full of choice and consequence, and highly repayable. Heartily recommended. I loved choosing and developing my base, and seeing things develop there -- my deepening relationships with companions, buildings rising, it turning into a little township of its own, full of its own activity. I loved getting mail -- hearing how things have proceeded after I made a choice or helped someone. The castle sequence is a fond homage to Zork and the era of "go north" and drawing your own maps. Even choices that seem like they might not be rewarded in most interactive fiction games -- silence in a conversation, going back to sleep instead of chasing a midnight will o the wisp, declining to go on a raid, failing to elude the sheriff -- have interesting outcomes, and the game is full of what feel like hidden nooks. It's remarkably branching and repayable for such a large, even epic game. It's warmhearted -- the couple romances I've played feel tender and real, as do the friendships and companions. It's often laugh out loud funny. The art is lovely and evocative. The changing seasons -- especially the seasonally shifting art -- give the game an earthy, sensuous quality appropriate to the Bold Outlaw of the green woods.... whoever he or she may be in your telling.
Review by Monica Y Fulvio on Nocked!.