Reviews by Denk

The premise for this game is excellent, whether you are religious or not. You are travelling back in time to find out what the mark of Cain was. The game mechanics are also great with many recipe puzzles which reminded me very much of the potion brewing in Gnome Ranger so good stuff! The game has a built-in hint system which answered all my questions. To begin with, I wanted to solve all puzzles by myself but at some point I became impatient because I was very eager to read the ending so I was less patient than usually. So I looked at the hints a few times. However, I never felt the game was unfair though at some point you need to refer to a part of some machinery which was in the protagonist's plain sight but wasn't mentioned unless under very specific circumstances (the spout) so that small bit could be improved.

Parser/Vocabulary (8/10)
Pretty good parser with a few strange responses but that happens rarely.

Atmosphere (9/10)
The writing is really good without being too verbose.

Cruelty: Merciful
I think you can never bring yourself in an unwinnable situation in this game.

Puzzles (9/10)
Great, satisfying puzzles.

Overall (9/10)
This may become a modern classic. It is a great game.

This game is a pretty good puzzlefest, where you have to escape from the Duke's castle, otherwise, something terrible will happen to you. The author warns you that the Duke wants to rape you, in case you find that too disturbing to carry on. I did carry on. After all, this will only happen if you don't manage to escape.

So besides the above terrible act, which isn't supposed to happen, the writing is good and whimsical in a standard fantasy setting. The puzzles were quite good too and not too difficult. I needed to peek at the walkthrough twice:

1. First, because of an uncritical but confusing bug(Spoiler - click to show) - After following Ulia to the Chapel I couldn't leave but had to follow her back and forth from the chapel until she finally settled in the chapel (at least this seems like a bug to me...)

2. The second time I needed to peek at the walkthrough was because something I wanted to do in a logical place apparently didn't work, so I was thinking that might be one more implementation bug, but it wasn't: (Spoiler - click to show)I thought I could burn the spell ingredients in the fireplace but that wasn't possible. It had to be done in the brazier. At least an explanation of why it couldn't be done in the fireplace would have been good.

Perhaps these things might be fixed in a post-comp release. Anyway, they did not affect my rating. It was certainly a good, fun game, which took me a little more than two hours to complete. Recommended.