Ratings and Reviews by Bernie

Ad Verbum is solely a puzzle game (no story or plot). Unlike traditional IF puzzles, the puzzles in Ad Verbum are word puzzles, mostly of 'guess the verb' form. In general, I detest 'guess the verb' puzzles, but this game succeeds beautifully by creating logical constraints for the verbs. While playing it, I found myself happily mulling over synonyms for 'take' and 'exit'. The writing in the game is very clever, and the author does an exceptional job of following the rules presented in the game, managing to give entire room and object descriptions using only, for example, words that begin with 'w'.

The game is relatively short. Most of the time you spend playing it will be spent thinking over puzzles. Ad Verbum is great for delivering the 'ah hah!' moment of a cleverly solved puzzle. It's also a terrific game for involving others in the puzzles. Normal IF puzzles are difficult to share with others, but it was simple to turn to my husband and say "I need a word that means 'exit' that begins with 's'." Indeed, my husband provided the necessary solutions for at least two of the puzzles.

This game is highly recommended as a diversion from more traditional IF, and is a must-play for any puzzle-lover.

The tag "primitive parser" says it all. This game is from the early days, and the parser supports almost none of the usual commands. You can't "examine", "look", or even "go". Instead, you type in the name of the room you would like to move to.

The premise is simple: you are solving a murder on a ship. The suspects are in different rooms and they say something to you when you enter. The game is a simple type of deductive logic game. As the opening paragraph states, NOBODY suspects the real murderer. So when a suspect accuses another suspect, you cross the accused off the list, eventually deducing the killer through process of elimination. The killer, location of the body, location of the suspects, and suspect accusations change each time you replay the game.

This game can be called "interactive fiction" only inasmuch as it has typed commands. There is no real interaction; it's only a simple deductive game, the type that I enjoyed when I was 8 and computers didn't have graphics. It's not worth playing unless you want a very brief and bugless trip down memory lane. It's about a 5 minute diversion that will remind you of your childhood in front of your Commodore 64.

This game could be classified as a less-interesting version of Varicella. In order to solve the puzzles, you will need to replay scenes over and over. (This repetition is necessary since the author has disabled the 'undo' command and limits the number of saves to 3) Once I hit my 8th time replaying the opening scene, I gave up and resorted to the 'hints' section.

This game is all about the puzzles (which the author states very clearly), so once you resort to the hints, all fun is removed from the game. The PC is unsympathetic and dopey (you must open doors before you walk through them, or he will bang into them, an event that ceases to be funny very quickly) and the NPCs understand almost nothing that you tell them.

Adding to the general frustration of the game were a few strange yet amusing bugs. For example, as I tried to hand one child a gold star, she responded "I don't want seconds." Apparently, she had already eaten all the gold stars she could. And when faced with an envelope full of gold stars, the command 'take gold star' meant that I would wrestle a gold star away from a crying child rather than take one out of the envelope.

Overall, the game's frustration factor was too high for me to finish it. I had to replay several boring turns just to arrive at the crucial puzzle point I was stuck at. I would attempt yet another unsuccessful solution, only to have to restart the game again to replay the entire first boring scene in order to get to the puzzle yet again. Being able to use the 'undo' command might have made this game more tolerable. There does not seem to be any good reason for disabling 'undo' except to make the game more obnoxious to solve. And if a game is going to be this obnoxious, it had better be really fun to play, which this one, sadly, isn't.

I love puzzles and spookiness, and have been looking for a game to hold up to my personal favorite spooky puzzle game, Anchorhead.

Lydia's Heart is not as spooky as Anchorhead. However, the setting is vividly described and the plot of the story created a sense of urgency in places, enough so that I jumped at least a few times when my husband interrupted me.

The puzzles were logical and interesting. A word of warning to future players, however, that sometimes looking in the same place at a different point in the game can yield a new item. This particular facet of the game was my one big point of frustration, since generally in IF I expect to find everything in an area when it's searched. However, I think if I'd known from the beginning that some areas could yield new items when I had different needs, I would have found the puzzles to be less frustrating. As it was, I ended up referring to the in-game hint system far more often than I like.

I'm not normally a fan of horror games, but the prose in this game was so well-written that I couldn't tear myself away. This is my #1 most recommended game to friends, since I found the puzzles fairly intuitive and fun.