Reviews by Denk

This is a fairly short but well done classic text adventure fitted into the memory of a Commodore 64 / emulator. I played the "play online"-version and except for the initial load and when saving/loading your progress, the responses were almost instant.

• The story is simple but fine enough for this type of "classic" text adventure: Go figure out what the latin test will be about, then copy the necessary text from the text book somewhere in the school. Along you will need to solve several puzzles.
• Of course, some games back in the days had better stories which would have improved this game some. Also, there are several latin phrases but I never learned latin so for me that was kind of wasted, though I could of course had translated it online if I bothered. But it was good enough as it was.

• At times the game was too helpful as opening an item or door often simply required e.g. OPEN DOOR when holding the right item, rather than specifying with the INSERT command. Speaking of commands, all verbs are given when typing COMMANDS so technically, this is a "limited parser"-game so no fighting the parser luckily!

  So despite the game being too easy, this was a charming little nostalgic piece :)

I have tried to beat this retro style Glulxe text adventure several times but got away from it, despite the highly atmospheric graphics and music. However, I recently completed the bigger ambitious "Andromeda Awakening - The Final Cut", also by Marco Innocenti, which Andromeda 1983 is based upon, though there are several differences in the puzzles. Still, a puzzle which prevented me from completing the game earlier, could be solved quite similar to how it was solved in "Awakening". Sometimes when I have been stuck, I am sometimes disappointed but this was not the case here. The game has only few but brilliant puzzles, both some easy ones and some tough ones.

Parser/Vocabulary (Rating: 8/10)
I understand that the author wanted a simple parser like the non-Infocom games in the 80s but there are left some modern conveniences in the parser as it would be too much trouble to remove them. So a better parser than intended!

Atmosphere (Rating: 10/10)
Perhaps the best thing about this game is the atmosphere. Brilliant pixel art and C64-like music tune full of suspense. The text is brief but sufficient.

Cruelty (Rating: Merciful)
It is my impression that the game cannot be unwinnable but it might be possible to deliberately break important objects - I didn't investigate that.

Puzzles (Rating: 8/10)
Some pretty good and fair puzzles, both easy and tough puzzles.

Overall (Rating: 9/10)
This is a short but very good game if you like games with a retro vibe.

EDIT: This is one of the few games I have kept thinking of sometimes - for that reason I raise my four-star rating to five which also fits with a round up of the overall 9/10 score given above. I did the same with "A Change in the Weather" which I also kept thinking of.