Reviews by Emily Short

This game has a lot going for it in respect of craft: it's well-written by someone with a keen sense of humor; the characterizations are often amusing; though the game is quite linear, the pacing works pretty well and I rarely felt bored.

The problem with it is its huge self-indulgence. This is a work, now several years old, about contemporary rec.arts.int-fiction politics. It is peppered with endless references to newsgroup personalities and squabbles that people outside the IF community are unlikely to understand, and even for those of us who were around at the time, it ages badly. A few years down the line, it's likely to need a critical commentary to make sense.

The premise is that the protagonist is locked into a haunted room with the puzzle box of the game's title. The hauntedness of the room is not especially important and the framing story barely affects play, though: instead, we spend the entire game entering a series of combinations into the puzzle box, each combination leading only to the opportunity to enter another one.

We discover the combinations, for the most part, by examining the environment, especially a highly detailed oil painting on the wall. There are a couple of puzzles that require some sort of leap of intuition to work out how an element of the painting reveals a combination for the lockbox, but quite often it is simply a matter of finding an appropriate sequence of colors and numbers and laboriously entering them into the box.

A mostly puzzle-oriented game about a girl locked in a tower as a sacrifice to the vampire who terrorizes her town. The challenge is to proof the room against the vampire's entry: this premise gives rise to a reasonably diverse but connected set of puzzles.

There are some flaws and frustrations, though. The ADRIFT parser lets the game down at odd times; the writing tends towards the melodramatic or faux-archaic, and doesn't set a consistent tone.

Still, I basically enjoyed playing this piece. It is short and relatively easy.

The premise of this piece is brave and ambitious: the protagonist is trapped in a building, pinned down by enemy fire, with another soldier not on his own side. It's up to him to overcome the soldier's suspicion and develop some kind of fragile rapport.

This is a intriguing idea, and it starts out well, with several neat exchanges and revelations. But ultimately the conversation is not entirely satisfying: the protagonist is under-characterized, the enemy soldier a little too unsubtle in certain respects. Some pieces of the dialogue could have stood to vary more with repetition or context, too: not all of the lines are equally appropriate in all the contexts in which they can arise.

Still, an interesting piece of work, especially for those with a taste for character-focused IF.

A brief, charming game with puzzles centered on a neat magical grammar. The system is well-designed and internally consistent, the puzzles are fun to solve, and there are lots of rewards for experimenting. For the most part the solutions are not too difficult, either, but there's a hint system, just in case.

Not long on story or characterization, but excellent for what it sets out to do.

Adam Cadre constantly experiments with the formal limits of IF, and shrapnel is another such experiment: it plays against the standard ideas of where the game begins and ends, and what a player should be allowed to control. It's worth playing if one is interested in the history of the form, or fond of Adam's writing; and it's short enough that it's not likely to feel like a waste of time, even for people who decide they don't care for it.

As far as content goes, though, shrapnel doesn't have a huge amount to recommend it. The story-line is a mess; the characters are brutal and largely unpleasant; the themes have been better and more richly explored in Adam's other work. As for the setting, it's a parody/re-envisioning of the infinitely-rehashed white house; and while Adam's version is more memorable than most, it isn't the kind of setting one wants to settle into and enjoy.

This game is an expansion on the classic logic puzzle hinted at in the title, expanded with a few extra challenges along the way. Even with those additions, though, it offers only about fifteen minutes' worth of play, in an unambitious setting, without much by way of story or characterization. There are a few cute moments in the descriptions, and the narrative tone is good-humored and pleasant; but it's nothing very memorable either.

This is a combat game about fighting fish.

The opening of the game is probably its weakest point: there’s not much information to ground the absurd set-up, and it’s also possible at first not to realize that you can do anything but PUNCH, SLAP, KICK, and BACKHAND the various fish. I went through a few rounds of that and found myself wondering whether there was more to the game than randomized combat. (It’s not really randomized, either, but I didn’t recognize that at the very outset.) So I came close to quitting, before I realized that there were both puzzles and a (slight) story in there; I just hadn’t really gotten to them yet.

Things pick up in the midgame, as new props become available to fight with, we learn a little more about the premise, and the fish start to fight back. The final fight ends with a fanfare and flourish that make the earlier fights seem more significant.

It’s still not what you would call a great game -- the game-play is too repetitive, and there is not enough feedback on puzzle solutions -- but it has a certain quirky charm.

An entry into a competition for games based on dreams, The Retreat feels just a bit off-kilter from our reality. Many elements of the backstory go unexplained for the whole game -- which is not very long.

Despite the relative slightness of the piece, though, it has evocative moments, and there was one action in particular that I felt guilty about when the game was over.

The first scene of this game is a favorite of mine: the player is called on to do a magic trick in front of an audience, though (of course) as player he does not know how the trick is done. But there's more to the scene than simply getting the trick right and solving the puzzle: on a replay, it's possible to turn the scene into a real performance, by hamming things up, tantalizing the audience, and making the most out of each stage. This allows for expressive play -- getting into the character of the PC and making the most of it -- to a degree I have seen in few other games.

When I first played, I found the pacing broke down a bit in the later scenes, and the writing became more overwrought. Replaying later, I found the later pieces of the game much more successful. I'm not sure whether this is because I was playing a later version of the game (these notes are based on version 6) or whether I was just luckier with my subsequent play-through. But on review, this piece impressed me quite a bit more than it did the first time around.