Ratings and Reviews by Harry Coburn

Uh-Oh is a Y2K post-apocalyptic game, but that's not really what the game here is about. The game here is a demon to a larger shareware IF game. The demo divides the game up into five phases with 20 turns per phase before being helpfully pushed to the next stage by the demo fairy. Nag screens are sprinkled throughout with full ordering instructions.

It's an interesting way to do a demo. Unfortunately, the site for ordering the game is now offline. Mailing checks to the address in Canada to get a copy of the full game is delightfully old-school but impractical these days. The full game may now be lost to the dustbin of history.

I also felt it was a poor idea to give the player a taste of each phase of the game. Even with only 20 moves, you get enough of a sense of the overall plot to spoil the story without spoiling the puzzles too badly. For puzzlers that's great, but for people more interested in unfolding the story it's not a good way to draw interest.

The only reason to play this now is to see how one author tried to create a shareware demo for an IF game. If the author ever runs across this review, please consider releasing the full game to IFDB.

Slouching Toward Bedlam shows up on a lot of top IF lists for good reason. It has a fascinating premise and excellent replay value. The steampunk touches made me keep playing. I especially enjoyed the (Spoiler - click to show)panopticon.

I've also studied my share of occult topics. The 19th century hermetic and kaballistic references were quite excellent and in context. The reveal of (Spoiler - click to show)knowing it's too late for the player character to get rid of the Logos and dealing with the consequences to drive the endings rather reminded me of the movie Pi.

What do I mean by "shows its age" then? The game feels rather unfinished in places. Notably, certain nouns weren't fleshed out that seemed obvious to me. Also, the parser didn't understand some verbs I expected. I had to look at the solution to get the verb for (Spoiler - click to show)wearing the noose, rather than seeing errors for "put on the noose" "put head in noose" or most annoyingly "hang myself". The latter especially got me when I activated the hangman, tried "kill myself", got "How, exactly", and neither "hang" nor "hanging" worked. I dearly wish the author would revisit the game after all this time and go through it with BENT (see Aaron Reed's book) in mind to flesh out the world, and also fix the parser issues.

That being said, this game is still very much worth your time to play. The core of the game is still sound even after all this time, and that's what counts.