Reader reviews for The Space Bar

Steve Meretzky’s The Space Bar is a mixed bag. On the one hand you have this funny game that has an original, diverse and beautifully created setting (with visuals that still look good after 15 years), but on the other hand it’s riddled with bugs (that will make it a challenge to play on a modern machine), and it has an amount of dead ends that was already long out of date at the time of its release. That, and the gameplay is simply brutal.
The Space Bar is quite possibly the hardest game I’ve ever played, but it’s not without its rewards. Dying will occasionally give you a chuckle, and it’s always worth it to go back to dialogues just to exhaust all options. All the ‘alien’ conversations and pop culture references make the game worth persevering, even though its difficulty often stands in its way. In fact, The Space Bar would have been more enjoyable if it wasn’t so bloody hard.
It also features a few design points that just feel ‘off’, probably a result of Meretzky’s history in text adventures (where some design elements don’t necessarily translate all that well to graphical games). And the sound editing is just plain awful: a lot of the time, two voices speak at once, and neither are subtitled. It’s nothing you can’t ignore, though, and the game should be given a chance, if only to look at the amazing worlds and plethora of alien creatures that Ron Cobb (of Star Wars and in particular the Mos Eisley Cantina fame) thought up…

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Time Played: Over 20 hours
Difficulty: Very Hard