Reviews by Kake

Although there are some very good ideas behind this game, it had far too many technical issues for me to continue playing it.

First of all, I was put off by the quality of the writing. I haven't seen any other reviewers bringing this up — and one or two have actually said they thought the prose was good! So maybe my standards are too high, but I felt the writing was stilted, unpolished, and entirely lacking in any kind of style. (I did actually wonder whether it had been written by a precocious child or a very young teenager, but apparently the author is in his mid-twenties.)

Mainly, though, I didn't get very far through because I gave up in disgust when I discovered (from the walkthrough) that something the parser had been refusing to let me interact with — or even look at — was in fact vital to further progress. This wasn't an isolated problem, just the most egregious example. I'm not going to spend time playing a game that I can't trust to be fair with me.

I've had a few goes at this game now, and although I've managed to reach a couple of unsatisfactory endings, I've not yet been able to complete the storyline I'm aiming at. It's not as though I'm obviously in a failure situation, either; I'm just stuck at a point where nothing I do seems to progress the story. So I can't really write a proper review. Also, I occasionally found myself guessing at the correct syntax, something that shouldn't really be necessary in a well-tested game.

I do want to say that I like the way you can ask characters about other characters (and indeed themselves), and I like the way the story's told in the past tense.

Full of typos, and I couldn't figure out what I was meant to do. Also, the parser was constantly getting the cigar and the cigar case mixed up, for example:

>drop cigar
Which do you mean, the cigar or the cigar case?

>cigar
Which do you mean, the cigar or the cigar case?

>cigar
Which do you mean, the cigar or the cigar case?