Reviews by JohnD

This is an unusual type of IF game, where a series of maths challenges take precedence over the standard sort of exploration and environmental and object-based puzzling.

This is not without precedence, considering L - a Mathemagical Adventure from 1984, and a general crossover of interests (it seems) for authors in programming, mathematics and storytelling.

The premise is that you are a magic-user taking a new practical exam in 'arithmancy.' You must cast spells to visit numbers in a particular sequence to achieve your goals.

It's a little bewildering to begin with, as you first work out how to approach this, as very few of the usual adventuring commands are needed. Most of your commands will consist of spells to manipulate a number. You start off with one spell and unlock more and more as you progress, increasing the complexity of the available calculations as you go.

There is a bit of a narrative here, but not much. It's more of a background chatter as you overhear your examiners discussing university politics (it's pretty funny too). The good thing is, they don't know you can hear them, so their sarcastic criticisms of your efforts function as useful clues.

Overall, it's an absorbing challenge, and you might spend longer than you intend trying to figure it all out. I did, certainly, and I didn't quite manage the full score (although I still passed the exam- phew!)

It seems like an obvious statement, but you need to take some pleasure from numbers and maths to enjoy this. But if you do, I can confidently say you will love the game. It's very cleverly constructed and you'll feel clever as you progress through the puzzles (and that's what we all want, isn't it?)...

This is a fun short choice-game that sports some surprisingly deep world-building for a game that was written under a strict three-hour time limit. Or perhaps, it is simply riffing on the Great Underground Empire/Zork universe and I'm not very well up on that any more... Either way, the simple premise has a convincing world behind it and the cracks don't show. The writing style is sympathetic to the Zorkian world and generally delivers.

You are stuck in a derelict old antiques shop and you must survive by making light by any means until help arrives (which it reliably does after x moves). It is an entertaining concept and your survival must be ensured by setting ablaze anything that looks like it will burn for a few minutes, as well as other strategies.

It's not really difficult to survive (just keep clicking those links!) but I suppose the puzzle is to find all the things you need quickly enough. I found the game fairly easy, but it was a diverting 15 minutes! (There is also a bonus item that can be claimed by solving an actual puzzle, which I did: hooray!)

This is a cool concept, entertainingly delivered, but suffers because surviving is a bit too easy. I wish the difficulty had been ramped up to increase the tension.

(I played this by downloading it from Wayback Machine, but I didn't get the music/sound so I can't comment on that aspect of the game.)

Ravine is a short but impactful horror with well-written characters and a creative and original plot. I felt comfortable inhabiting the role of the corporate investigator visiting a remote mountain research station. I got into it; I think it made me more hard-nosed as a person (temporarily, haha). Your character has a disturbing backstory that gains significance as the game advances.

Tension imbues the game, and every choice you are asked to make, right from the start. I felt like each decision I had to make was important and that it might influence the outcome of the story. (Whether each decision was actually important is a different matter, but I was fully engaged, and that is crucial.)

This is a standard branching-path Twine game with multiple good/bad/in-between endings. Allow up to two hours for a leisurely play through and be aware that there is not a save game feature. There isn't really an inventory or puzzle-solving to content with, but you can certainly take the wrong path in the latter part of the game - this is where 'undo' comes in handy (and it's also good for exploring alternate endings if you don't want to play through again).

I actually ended up going playing the first half more than once, and it was interesting to make different choices and also to pick up on some of the little hints of the horrors to come in the text. This was very nicely done and makes it worth playing the game again.

The quality of the writing is very high and the atmosphere and tension is second to none. The characters are convincing and well-drawn. The horrors are suitably horrible: you won't come away disappointed!

In the Axolotl Project, alien life has at last been discovered, and closer to Earth than you might expect. But, this being Earth, an amoral corporation is exploiting the benign creatures for its own material gain. There are nefarious goings-on aplenty on the moon-base where you are based as a downtrodden intern. It seems like you will have your work cut-out to turn a dire situation around...but as it turns out, it's easy to navigate your way through the game with very little friction. In a game where you come very close to being killed, and the odds are stacked against you, it would definitely add to the tension and atmosphere if you could fail and get killed - but I don't believe you can.

This game has some positive aspects coupled with a couple of serious flaws. The drawbacks didn't completely spoil it for me, but it could have been a lot better. The addition of some actual peril would have helped. There are three parts to play through, and each one took me about an hour.

This is a choice-based game written with Twine, which is presented in the style of a classic parser game. You simply click the hyperlinks to navigate the world instead of typing commands. This succeeds at evoking the atmosphere of a dark sci-fi themed text adventure, as least to begin with. Sadly, the sheen wears off due to the lack of player freedom and mechanisms to very meaningfully deliver and solve puzzles. There is simply no way the player can miss an opportunity to use an object as a direct hyperlink is always offered at the appropriate time. It would perhaps have been better if the player had to go into their inventory to decide when to try using an object.

I liked the story, which had some thought-provoking and creative ideas in it, as well as a super-scale moral dilemma to wrestle with. I actually think the game is worth playing just for these aspects. There are certain parts of the story that are quite dark, including the opening segment, the end of part one, and the denouement, as well as the whole idea of exploiting the axolotls for monetary and human gain. The problem with the story is that it has quite an inconsistent tone. There's a lot of seriousness, dark themes, and some serious threats for the player-character to face down. However, our heroine, a downtrodden young intern, has quite a line in sassy remarks and put-downs, the tone of which just feel inappropriate when they are directed towards other characters. It's a shame, because there are a lot of witty observations in the text that did make me laugh, but somehow the themes of the story and the nature of the main character did not gel for me. I think the author was trying to leaven some of the heavier content with humour, but it just didn't work in the context of the whole piece. Similarly, at times, several of the characters veer more into caricature, or in one case, comic-book villain. Possibly this was a deliberate way to lighten the tone, but I'm not sure it was successful.

The quality of the writing is generally high, and this, together with the creative ideas in the story, generally decent characters, interesting setting, and apposite themes of corporate greed and ruthlessness makes the Axolotl Project worth playing despite its imperfections. As long as you are mainly hoping for story and not puzzles, you should be fairly happy.

The Missing Ring is a charming whodunnit mystery where you take the role of a fourteen-year-old girl investigating who has stolen her Grandmother's engagement ring. The entire story takes place on Christmas Eve night and Christmas Day, ending with a classic reveal where you must accuse one character of taking the ring when the family gathers for Christmas dinner.

During the main portion of this choice-based game you are free to explore your grandmother's house and question family members at will. There is a rudimentary inventory system and your notebook usefully reminds you which leads you still need to follow up.

The game took me about an hour and a half to play through. The story was enjoyable throughout but there aren't really any puzzles to speak of - you simply need to click on all the hyperlinks in a reasonable order, which isn't too challenging! The overarching mystery itself is a good one. Even though I guessed the correct culprit, I didn't really have a properly developed theory as to their motivation. In hindsight, there were quite a few subtle clues, and the whole thing does hang together really well, maybe I'm just not too good at solving mysteries!

Ultimately, the strengths of the story are the brilliant representation of awkward family dynamics, the sympathetically described but quirky characters, and the protagonist's reaction to a series of uncovered revelations that are not necessarily related to the titular ring. There is a nice line in gentle, observational humour throughout and the story is rather touching in places as well.

Overall, a very enjoyable and engaging story, and a cosy (slightly) festive mystery, but it's rather light in terms of puzzles and challenge.

It is important to approach Moondrop Isle in the right frame of mind, because if you want to go the distance and complete the game, yours will not be a short visit. Mine must have lasted 20-30 hours, though I wasn't counting.

The island is huge and intricate, with a wide variety of puzzles, some of which are devious. The game is sedately-paced and ideally, you need to be prepared to explore methodically and make a map (there are over 300 locations).

The basic theme is urban exploring, where you are visiting an abandoned holiday resort in the middle of the night. The writing is generally atmospheric without ever feeling like it gets in the way of the game demanding to be played.

If I hadn't made a commitment to play this game I would have probably given up after my first session and found something that offered more immediate satisfaction. I am glad I didn't because I did enjoy the game immensely, though it is some distance from perfect. You will spend your first hour wandering around, looking for items to collect, looking for puzzles to solve, and looking for a story thread to follow, and you will likely come up short on all three counts. All three ARE there, and the first two in abundance. The story comes into its own in the final act, when you get there, and you will be fully invested by that point. It will take at least ten hours to even get to the first hints of a narrative!

There is a huge amount of content, some brilliant puzzles (and a few that aren't so great), loads to discover, mysteries to uncover, and a fair few time sinks - like attempting to play golf or arcade games - with a text interface, naturally! There is an element of guesswork and randomness to these that is frustrating and some may find off-putting. You will also encounter the occasional problem with the parser, such as commands that work in one area of the game, but not another.

After a while, I did start to feel like an urban explorer on a real adventure simply for my own pleasure and curiosity. That's when I really got into it and the game was there in my head, pleasantly in the background as I yearned to make more progress.

There is a difficulty spike in the puzzles around 3/4 of the way through and I recommend taking a few hints, as I did. A number of the tougher puzzles can be skipped, and this can be done by accident, which is not ideal, though it makes this one of the few text adventures with replay value.

I ended up feeling that the whole venture was very ambitious and it is rather wonderful that it was attempted at all. It is essentially nine games stitched into one, which does bring some problems with mechanics and consistency, but in the end raises the whole into something truly interesting, with some bold and unexpected design decisions.

The Plant begins with your boss's car breaking down in the middle of the night, miles from anywhere. Mr Teeterwaller, your boss, seems entirely ineffectual so it is left to you to get the situation in hand. Unfortunately, things soon get very OUT of hand as you witness a dramatic incident outside the industrial plant of the title. In rather suspicious fashion (I thought) the hitherto totally-wet-lettuce-like Teeterwaller decides he wants to break into the plant to see what is going on, and he wants you to help him! It smelled like a stitch-up to me, but as I didn't have anything better to do I went along with it.

The game was written in 1998 (quite modern by my standards!) and the story has a flavour of the X-files, which was quite an influence at the time. At several points the story is revealed in cut-scenes, where you are watching events unfold but you can't really influence them. You can still type commands but in practice you end up just typing 'wait' repeatedly until the action has finished. No doubt it would be more immersive if you could get more involved in the action, but it works fine. I agree with the author's notes, where he says this was a better way to tell the story than just presenting huge blocks of text (while acknowledging the weaknesses). Incidentally I thought the menu of 'additional content' at the end of the game was a nice touch.

The best part of The Plant for me was the quality and variety of the puzzles: I really enjoyed solving them. Overall, the game is very tightly designed and well thought-out. The modern industrial setting is also very well suited to adventuring and it didn't feel like the game was unfairly restricting my movement or what I could try to do at any point. I kicked myself that I referred to a walkthrough too quickly when I was stuck on one occasion - perhaps cheating myself out of that elusive feeling of cleverness when you finally solve a puzzle. ALL of the puzzles were logical and sufficiently well set up and clued to make them feel fair. Also, there were no throwaway easy puzzles of the basic lock-and-key or fetch quest types, so kudos to the author.

This is the first time I have played a TADS game and I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the parser and the types of interaction and manipulation of objects that it was capable of. As the author Michael Roberts also wrote TADS, I wondered if the game was partly a kind of tech demo to show what was possible with the engine. Maybe that is true, but as The Plant was released well after the launch of TADS2 and years before TADS3 I don't think that was its primary purpose. With all the wizardry on show, like the fire hose that could be dragged around, and the intricate machinery in the warehouse, and the garage opener settings, and all the unusual 'Blottnian' verbs you could try, it was a bit of a surprise that the parser fell down by not accepting simple commands like TALK TO and LISTEN.

I suppose the game shows its age a little with some of the ponderous mechanics, especially when manoeuvering the window cleaning platform, or trying to fathom that blinking card machine! I also felt that some aspects of the game were under-developed, for example, it would have been great to be able to get the dog to follow you to the plant to solve another puzzle (I was expecting this). Mr Teeterwaller, according to the author's notes, was not part of the original design of the game, but was added in. It shows somewhat, because he follows you round being useless and copying what you do, but he can't be utilised in solving any of the puzzles. A missed opportunity!

Generally, the game is most enjoyable for the puzzle solving and strong implementation. The atmosphere is also well crafted, and the story has an interesting and dramatic conclusion. Some of the world-building feels a little tongue-in-cheek in the classic Infocom style, I'm particularly thinking of all the stuff about Blottnia, which I guess is like a fictitious former Soviet republic. This detracts slightly from the otherwise serious tone of the game.