Reviews by Joe Pereira

Emily Short turns IF on its head every time she makes a new game. She excels in 2 areas: a) she has an incredible command of prose - the stories are very compellingly told. I would pay to read her books; b) Imaginitive story-telling mechanics (think the servants and bells in Bronze) and ingenious game-play mechanics (don't waste too much time figuring this one out). I also had to look at the hints to get started - and the clues were right there from the start! An incredible play on words - and all done in 4 afternoons!

This game is the perfect introduction to IF - great writing, simple puzzles, fantastic sense of humour, it's very short (20 minutes with a 2nd or 3rd playthrough) and an absolutely classic ending. It cleverly plays on the classic trope in IF of the player-character seemingly knowing as much about the environment as the interactor. A MUST play game.

As a first-time game, I congratulate the author on actually producing a playable work of IF. However, should we still be seeing this kind of game in 2009? The author has directly ported a standard graphical escape the room template to textual IF. While playable, I wonder if anybody actually enjoys story-less, basic use object on object-type puzzle games anymore. I might recommend the game as an introduction to basic object manipulation in IF, but other than that, there is nothing there. This may only appeal to lovers of graphical escape the room games - of which I am not. The fact there is no story, no characterization whatsoever, makes me wonder if it can be called IF at all. As I have yet to play an absolutely horrible first time IF game (of which I hear there are many), I give it 2 stars.