Reviews by Bernie

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.