Ratings and Reviews by Simon Deimel

For a speedIF entry this is an extremely well organized game with well crafted details and a hilariously unpleasant NPF (non-player fish). The atmospheric messages are funny and give a personality to the fish. The game can be solved within a few moves, but the enjoyment of it emerges from realizing the little details found in the room and exploring the life and motives of the acting person.

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.

I am sure the writer of this game had a good intention. So the game is supposed to show the importance of safety at work, and that is fine. Improvised methods at a construction site can be dangerous for instance. I have seen photos of painters on adventurous ladder constructions.
So this game is located in an office building -- also okay. There are potential dangers. Let's see, what comes to mind? A partially broken wire of an office computer. Or another scene, an office worker places a candle with an open flame on his desk around Christmas, then is called away and forgets about it...
So no offence, but using a coffee vending machine (which has nothing to do with the work itself) as an object to demonstrate the importance of safety seemed a bit strange and even amusing to me. There are probably better examples, like those mentioned above.

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.