Reviews by Simon Deimel

Considering that it was a speedIF entry, this game is very well done.
The wordplays are not difficult to understand, and the prose is written in stanzas, making this a piece of poetry. The ending is heart-warming.

It is recommendable for beginners who want to see the basic concepts of IF and advanced players who like a short diversion.

A short story about a dad and his daughter, about emotions and things that can disturb them.
I was intrigued from the very beginning, although there is hardly any interactivity in the story. The dialogues are powerful, coming to live with an authentic feeling. The ending is sad, but the reader also sees a glimmer of hope, so it is very satisfying.

The pacing is fantastic. There are some pauses and the lines of each dialogue part are not revealed all at once, but little by little... it makes the reader feel like being part of the scene.
The use of different colors is also great: the dialogues use a different color for each character to make obvious whose statement we are reading.

The prose is totally okay. There are dialogues, presented as mentioned above, and narrative parts. I recognized one or two typos, which could easily be fixed.

I recommend this story (yes, it is a story rather than a game) to everyone who likes tales that appeal to the heart.

This was an entry for a speed IF competition in German language.

In dem Spiel geht es darum, zwei Plutonite (bestimmte Arten von Gestein) zu finden und so eine Wette zu gewinnen. Man wandert also in den Wald und untersucht die verschiedenen Orte, um der Steine habhaft zu werden. Dabei gibt es auch ein kleines Puzzle, welches sich jedoch wie von selbst löst; es wäre auch nicht klar, daß die ausgeübte Handlung einen Stein zu Tage fördert, also ist das eher im Sinne des Spielers.
Für einen Speed-IF-Beitrag ist die Geschichte ganz ordentlich gemacht. Mir hat sie jedenfalls Spaß gemacht und ich denke, man kann sie gut und gerne weiterempfehlen.

It is also recommendable for people who learn German as a foreign language. There were no obvious mistakes in the writing, and the prose is sparse, so there is not much translation work required.

There is not much time spent on finding out what to do in this game: the player simply has to behave like a tough barbarian, destroying everything which can possibly destroyed.

The game offers some little puzzles, but they can be solved quite easily. There is hardly anything like a plot -- so the story is about doing what the title of the game is, and there is not much more to be done. Just kill everything. And if there is not any such a thing, try to find it. And then kill it.

It sounds dumb and it probably is, but in a funny way. The ending highlights the joke behind it all. As the puzzles are quite easy, this game is recommendable for beginners of the genre. It is short, straight to the point and positively worth a try.

It is just a joke, alright. I get that. It might have been funny in some way, but it does not work for me in the current version.

It may be a coding exercise, but there is not much exercised here: "straight" and "left" and "right" are not defined as proper directions (the game simply demands the cardinal directions to be used -- in a way that makes them meaningless), the commands not in use are not implemented or deactivated (so "X car" produces the standard response of not seeing any such a thing), and there is no proper ending (the player ends in a room called "End Game" with the room description of the victory). There is no prose -- some descriptions should have been added to convey a feeling. These are just some of the things which might have been improved and which deviate from what I am used to find in Z-code games. Joke games are okay, in fact I like them. A short play with a punchline, a nice ending -- it is good. But jokes can be polished too. The basic idea is not bad, but needs more prose and some improvements.

The game is set in modern times, but contains elements of a Zorkian adventure: spell scrolls. So you basically have a modern slice-of-life setting with a modern aim to be achieved, but to finish the game you have to draw on casting a spell (not much of a spoiler, the player is going to find this out very soon). The game is easily solved and ends with a joke.

I did not play the whole bunch of Infocom games when I was young, so there was no nostalgia effect for me. Nevertheless I found the story entertaining enough to make me find a solution. The method how to solve it was easy to find, the trick is very obvious.

Recommended mainly for beginners -- it is short and does not cause much frustration. Veterans of IF will probably feel unchallenged. Then again the game is very short, so there won't be much time lost.

This is not really a game, but an electronic book. There is no real interactivity, each of the short paragraphs presents a drawing of the scene and only one option, so choosing it is like flipping a page in a book. The player, or in this case reader, cannot make decisions which change the progress of the story line. There is not a possibility to win or lose -- the ending is predetermined.

Regarding the fact that there is not even the illusion of interactivity, I would give a rating of two stars, but the drawings have heart, I like them; there can be a moral interpreted into the story; it is short and the colours of the background are friendly; so I want to add one star.

I recommend to take a look. It is a very short lecture and there is not much time wasted if the concept is not your cup of tea.

This is a quite short game which does not take much time. The story is okay, there are some puzzles and an ending, and a solution to prevent getting stuck.

The story presents the player being stuck in a subway section, unable to escape from that place. The player has to deal with various items. The puzzles appeared a bit arbitrary to me -- I sometimes failed to see the causality of them -- I solved one puzzle and then something happened, and I did not necessarily find it related to my previous actions. So it was not always easy to find out what to do next, and I had to consult the walkthrough sometimes to find sense in what was going on. The aim is a bit unusual, one would expect that the player is supposed to escape from the tube station, and in the end he might succeed, but it is not explicitly made the purpose of the game. A player will maybe find the actual aim a bit unspectacular to feel motivated.

I can recommend this game anyway, it is surely a nice diversion, as long as you don't expect a masterpiece.

Probably no other beginning of a noncommercial game is as well known as the opening paragraph of FOR A CHANGE. It gets right to the point: that is what happened, that is what you have to do, and for some reason you have something.

The game comes up with a world that is different from what we know. To show how different it is, the language makes use of unusual words for common things -- the player gets hold of a dictionary soon and can consult it about the unusual expressions.

The atmosphere reminds me of graphical adventures like Myst or Riven -- even without using graphical elements FOR A CHANGE succeeds in depicting a surreal world. Exploration is one part of it, even if the player gets to know what has to be achieved in the first paragraph. There is no reason explained why the player has to do it, but you get the feeling that it makes perfect sense. There are not too many locations, not too many objects, but they are parts of a comprising puzzle and have to be put together.

The game is puzzle-orientated. Some of the puzzles are cleverly made up, some let me stumble over unusual expressions. But that was probably my own fault. I clearly recommend this game: although there is not much characterization of the player, the puzzles will be a worthy challenge.

First things first: for a speedIF this game is astonishingly rich. There are only two locations, but many items that are implemented, some of them with nice descriptions. The story concept is also nice and motivates the player. Also good: after a while it is clearly stated what has to be achieved to win the game.

But then it becomes incredibly hard to deal with the different objects; I had to take a long look at the walkthrough. It is almost impossible to find the solution: exact timing is necessary to make progress, and if the right moment is missed, the game can easily be brought into an unwinnable state without any information about it. There are hardly any hints given which object has to be used at which time. Some aspects can only be found by guessing them. The difficulty level is increased dramatically.

So, playing this without a walkthrough is almost a waste of time in my view; it is a pity that the author has not revised this game with an otherwise fine premise and added more hints to make it more accessible.