Ratings and Reviews by Trant Heidelstam

I had great expectations for this highly-rated game written by a celebrated author, but the playing experience ended up to be very frustrating.

You start in an old-style, unforgiving adventure, of the kind that was popular in the 20th century. After some time you are catapulted in an upper-level universe where you are informed (in case you had not noticed before) that the story you have played up to that point is a game-inside-a-game. The characters in the outside world are other players of that game and can give hints on how to proceed.

So far, so good. You can play alternately the “inside” adventure while enjoying the “outside” interactive fiction. The former is cruel and will happily kill you for each mechanical imprecision, but you can restart it in a couple of commands, and meanwhile you can enjoy the friendly and carefully crafted outside world, collecting the next hint to proceed and enjoying some moments of relax where you can interact in a safe environment.

Unfortunately, the warm feeling does not last. The hints for the inner adventure progressively get sparser and less reliable, so that its fake difficulty becomes very real. You have to perform an ever-increasing sequence of actions to return to the point where you were killed the time before. Granted, your Z-machine interpreter can hopefully save and replay actions saving you time, but probably you won't enjoy seeing the “Open file...” dialog every two minutes. Meanwhile, the outside world does not evolve, making it less and less interesting to linger in there.

This process killed all my enthusiasm. At the end I was so exhausted that I just got a walkthrough and reproduced the actions. There I discovered that in the apparently safe outside adventure I had made an irreversible action which secretly locked me out of all but the worst possible ending. But this was not too bad news for me as such ending was also the shortest one.

I guess I missed a lot of what makes the game so special for many players, be it the subtle references to classic games of the Eighties or the elaborate alternative endings with multiple levels of reality. But even after reading various analyses, I feel this game is too exclusive and could have offered something more for the laypeople. I'm not an IF expert but I am also not a total novice, so I wonder which level of experience in interactive fiction is required to really “get” this game.

This game is naive, juvenile and with a lot of rough edges. And yet, I had a ton of fun with it.

You start as a prisoner being interrogated. Your first decisions are typical of an adventure/RPG (gender, skill points, abilities), but soon you are presented more unusual choices, which give you the possibility to define the backstory. Are you guilty? Do you know who framed you? It's up to you to decide! Only your Luck attribute is, most appropriately, mainly left to chance. Depending on your choices the story evolves in many unpredictable directions – you may end up winning the game thanks to your wizardry or ninja skills, or simply by being tough enough.

It is this explosion of possibilities that made me give four stars to this admittedly very minor game. The writing is nothing to speak about, probably made by a teenager, and the characters are just sketched, but I enjoyed a lot exploring the palace and its prison, slowly figuring out yet another escape possibility, winning the game with a carefully planned sequence of choices or with a couple of lucky random decisions.

Not an obligatory play by any means, but a fun way to pass the time and get some solace from the everyday worries.