Ratings and Reviews by Joey Jones

The Book of Living Magic is a short and easy graphical point-and-click adventure game with a zany fantasy setting, aimed at a younger audience. It's chief draw is the wealth of examinable discrete scenery objects, rewarding exploration. The over-arching plot is sweet, if a tad ham-fisted at times. The conversation system could do with being more organic: typically, you can talk about most things before knowing why they're relevant. The tone of the piece wavers around the zany/sentimental border, with slight nods to the macabre (especially with the cat). I don't regret playing it.

Myriad steps towards the kind of branching story I always wanted to read: to hell with merging nodes, I want full bifurcation, 24/7; and Porpentine obviously also heard the sirens of unreasonable work-load calling and dove into the pools of unending possibilities and dragged out this strangle-weeded narrative, a pocket of infinities. The quality is high, mostly consistently so; for most of it I was thinking 'Yeah, this is pretty good, I can see what she's doing here, blah blah, blah,' but then I played the scorpion queen section, which borders on being a puzzle, and it was okay; BUT THEN, then afterwards the denouement hit me like the well crafted metaphor that it was and I felt compelled to give it a write up pronto-like.

[So uh, don't waste time not reading Myriad when you could be reading Myriad. For me, (and I love-hate star ratings) this would have been a five star experience if my jaw hadn't taken four play-throughs to drop.]