Dr Ego and the Egg of Man-Toomba

Dr Ego and the Egg of Man-Toomba is an adventure game very much in the style of the Indiana Jones movies. Arriving in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, you’re on the hunt for a legendary golden egg. Armed with your fedora and trusty bullwhip, you’ll have to navigate several adventurous challenges — including outsmarting a monkey, surviving a precarious rope bridge crossing, and gaining the assistance of the natives — if you’re going to succeed.

Dr Ego falls in line with an older style of parser IF in that it features quite sparse location descriptions. However, there is a lot of attention to detail in other parts of the game, and these do the work of immersion that you might otherwise expect of the room descriptions. For example, your journal contains quite a bit of information on Papua New Guinea. Rain also comes and goes, and if you carry your torch in the rain too long then it will go out. You can get lost in the jungle, but a quick look at your trusty compass will get you back on track. The game also implements a notion of weight for portable objects, which occasionally restricts what you can do with them or while carrying them.

The puzzles are logical and generally clued fairly well. For one particularly complicated action the game tells you exactly which commands you need and in what order, saving you from what would otherwise be some guess-the-verb issues. The only unclear moment for me occurred when I needed to perform the same action several times in order to solve a puzzle; until I’d actually solved it the game didn’t indicate that I was making progress by doing the action more than once.

I was also curious about the game’s name. The PC is “Dr Ego,” which sounds like we’re headed for some pointed comedy at the expense of a player character with an inflated idea of his own importance. But the game never goes there, and in fact the PC is never really fleshed out beyond what you see in the beginning of the game.

Overall, I’d say Dr Ego and the Egg of Man-Toomba is a fine game. Other than the attention to detail I mentioned earlier, nothing particularly stands out to me about it, but neither is there anything that it does poorly. I enjoyed playing it, and I imagine other fans of older-style parser games would as well.