Ratings and Reviews by Danielle

LEADLIGHT is the most gory, horiffic, survival-horror, text-based entertainment you'll have on an Apple II in 2010 during the Halloween season!

YES you will be annoyed that you have to type "ex mirror" instead of "x mirror" in order to look at things.

MAYBE you will, like me, wish the plot made a little more sense (I only missed a handfull of secrets, but I still have questions: (Spoiler - click to show)So why is Great-Great-Grandmother out to kill me? Did she cause the massacre, or am I responsible? The girls seem to blame me, but obviously the Founder thinks I'm a horrible person who needs to be destroyed. But the Founder's doing the black magic...right? I'm so confused.).

But if atmosphere is your thing, you're gonna love LEADLIGHT because it is chock full of it.

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You wake up in your all-girl Australian boarding school, and everything is wrong. Terrible, uneasy things await you in nearly every scene. But this isn't a slideshow of an empty, spooky school. Oh no. LEADLIGHT is crawling with your former classmates, all gone mad...(Spoiler - click to show)and most trying kill you.

Here, LEADLIGHT introduces an RPG flavor into the mix; you obtain items and clothing which affect your abilities in the game. These elements helped immerse me inside the world; when you don't know what you're going to face when you go into a room, you're a little more cautious about entering it.

But despite all your caution, you are going to die in this game. There are gruesome death traps everywhere, and not all of them are spelled out for you. In a world where we praise games for being "forgiving" some might shout, "That's not fair! There was no warning you were going to kill me!"
However, in this setting, the sudden deaths adds to the sense of peril you feel. (It helps that after you die, there is an option to Undo to the moment before you hit the trap.)

And for all our boasting about modern IF parsers and their ability to understand complex commands, Mr. Clarke makes the 2-word parser your ally, helping simplify puzzles that might have become unwieldy if given more options.

There were a couple places I got stuck on (and were not referenced to in the hint guide--in particular, (Spoiler - click to show)I feel bad that I had to kill a traumatized girl to get her ribbon; if there was an alternative solution, I didn't see it). But these spots were later in the game. With judicious use of the three save spots, I never found myself locked into a situation I couldn't escape.

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LEADLIGHT walks a fine line. On the one hand, there's not a lot of deep characterization or background going on. It's gory in the way I imagine slasher films are. And the "survival" aspect has you dealing out mindless death at the pace you might associate with an FPS.

On the other hand, there are a smattering of interesting choices you can make within the game, such as (Spoiler - click to show)killing the Dancer, which seem to demand a second play if only to see how those choices change the outcome.

It's the perfect Halloween treat--perfect for a night when you want some creepy thrills. I encourage any fan of ANCHORHEAD or THEATRE to try this one.

(PS -- If you download the full package that comes with the IFComp 2010 collection, you'll be treated to a handsomely-illustrated manual and spiffy hint sheet that took me back to the days of Sierra Online adventure games.)

OK, so really it's more of a programming test. You get home, you have to do some things, then shut down your house for the night before you go to bed.

Now, I haven't programmed my own IF game, but I've dabbled in it a few times and, you know, I've got to give Anonymous credit for finishing and releasing this thing.

It's competent. The parser replies aren't *too* snarky, there are "reminder" texts that occur to help keep you on-track and towards your goal. There's even a cute hamster.

My main complaint was that, in order to solve (Spoiler - click to show)"taking out the trash", you had to go to a section that is (to my memory) never mentioned in any other room's description. I mean, I searched for that (Spoiler - click to show)trash can for over 20 minutes, and I don't even think there are 5 rooms in the entire house. It was a very annoying problem that could have been fixed with just one line of description.

So it's probably not a game most need to play.

But I still want to give the author kudos. Kudos for producing this. You did it! You finished a whole game.

If you came to VIOLET wanting a huge dungeon-crawler, you'll be disappointed. But if you're in the mood for something different, this game is a perfect little tidbit.

It's all about Violet. Come to think...yeah, it is all about her. A generic parser voice would turn this into another game about accomplishing a mundane in-office task. Instead, Violet editorializes upon your actions (whether good, bad, or stupid), and mentions memories that remind you that there's more at stake here than a thesis.

I also think if this game hadn't had such a good hint system, I would have had to've knocked down a star. Intially, it's a little tricky to catch on to the thread of logic, so when the hints ended up being more like the UHS system (in which a number of clues are given before the answer's handed out), AND in Violet's voice, I was very happy.

Violet is fun to listen to (my favorite pet name: "weet-bix"), and you feel a lot of genuine affection in the writing of this game. The spot-on implementation, charming voice, and perfect length make this equivalent to a short-story masterpiece.

"...and to introduce some of the hotter spring 2010 education technologies,"

Methinks the developers of this game weren't thinking of the IF community when they developed that blurb. "Hot" (and its variants) and "IF" do not go together, unless we are talking about some distant solar entity.

While I really enjoyed the concept (I love any game where you get to be an animal), and found the implementation solid (esp. of Christopher Robin, who is adorable), the puzzles were, for me, really obtuse. I ran to the walkthrough and still had no idea what would have led me to take that set of winning actions.

(Also, between this and "A Day for Soft Food"--what's with hostile NPC owners and animals?)