Ratings and Reviews by Anthony Mueller

This Kafkaesque game had me totally immersed from start to finish with a great story that unfolds slowly. There's a high level of interactivity with all sorts of objects and everything is well described. Highly polished with great attention to detail. The story really opens up after solving one hard puzzle, which I had to use a hint for, because I never would have got it. However, this did not detract from my score. In addition, I really loved the conversations with the NPCs which added a lot to the story. Personally, I have re-kindled my interest in IF after playing Scott Adams adventures as a kid and thought that this was a brilliant work of art which really opened up my eyes to the extended creative possibilities of Interactive Fiction. If you're interested in Distopias, pure logic, Kafka, Orwell, or political science fiction, this is the game for you.

I found this game enjoyable, with a very nice story, but it was a little underdeveloped at times. For example: when examining items, there were tons of items listed that had no descriptions. However, if you skipped any description, you may have missed an important item. Also, the puzzles were very hard and I felt were under-clued. This game frustrated me to the point where I skimmed the walk-through after a couple of days worth of play. Saying all of this, I really liked the writing and the concept of the piece. If it were a little more polished, I would have given it 4 stars.

I really enjoyed this. It's small, but the game environment is really fun and humorous. I have recently been reviving my interest in IF, and was rewarded with a challenging game that was just challenging enough to keep the interests up very high. I think that the author did a great job of cluing in subtle text to keep the world really alive. tick tick tick.

I recently played this game on a Commodore 64 emulator, for nostalgia reasons, since I had the game on an Commodore 64 when I was a kid. I read that Hassett wrote these games when he was 12 years old in 1979, so I think that it was a pretty good effort for his age. It's basically a maze with a very limited 2 word parser, however, there is some limited interaction with some random characters and the mazes work well. Good for when you feel up for a good treasure hunt. (Spoiler - click to show)I scored 175 out of 175 points, but do not know if there is a way to end the game without quitting or dying, because I was missing 15 bonus points out of the 32 bonus points, for the Commodore port, and wonder if there are some additional actions to be taken in the Tomb.

I spent a number of hours on this one. The c64 version using an emulator. The navigation around the world is like one big maze where going East then West right away may take you to a completely different path than where you started. In addition, I found Dr. Livingston, but I could not get him or rescue him. I looked at a walk-trough and what I was typing should have worked, but there seem to be serious problems with the parser -- at least on the version I played. I spent way too much time on this out of nostalgia when I could have been playing something else.