Ratings and Reviews by Doug Orleans

This game starts with the admonition "If you intend to write a review or discuss it with others, I suggest you play through it exactly once." Well, I helped playtest this game, so I played through it several times, and I'm going to use that knowledge in this review. Sorry about that.

To be honest I'm not really sure what's intended by this instruction. You can go in one of two directions from the start room, and when you come back, the other direction is no longer available; this means that you're only going to see roughly half the game in each playthrough. I guess the idea is to emphasize the PC's inability to rescue all of the artifacts and memories from the island before it sinks into the water, and perhaps to put players in the position of reunited refugees, comparing disparate remnants from the land they were forced to leave. It's interesting to contrast this with Captain Verdeterre's Plunder, which explicitly encourages multiple replays to get a high score by finding the best subset of things that can be rescued from the sinking ship.

Anyway, as far as I noticed, the two halves are not appreciably different from each other. Both involve picking through the ruins of a decadent polytheistic society, learning about the baroque and often grotesque practices of the worshippers of the various gods. The intro also announces that the game "is a purely exploratory piece", though this is not quite true either: there are a few simple puzzles involving finding a light source, and your score is kept based on how many memories you find, based on examining various features and objects. A nice touch is that once you've found most of the memories, the SCORE command includes hints for finding the remaining memories.

One somewhat peculiar feature is that the story is told in the third person, past tense. This is introduced at the start by "As a girl, she...", indicating that the rest of the playthrough represents the PC's memories of escaping the sinking island in the distant past. It's interesting how this simple device, explaining why the game doesn't use second-person present as usual for parser IF, makes the rest of the text sound a little more natural, compared to a game like A Long Drink where the use of past tense is not explained. There are a few places where the text slips into present tense, e.g. the description of the lantern; here I must personally apologize, because while I caught many of these slips in playtesting, I see now that I missed that one and probably some others. (It's surprisingly easy not to notice these slips!) On the other hand, even most of the error messages are (perhaps automatically?) cast in third-person past tense, which can be a bit jarring, e.g. "She couldn't go that way" whenever you try to go in a direction that has no exit, or "She wasn't feeling especially drowsy" when you try to SLEEP. I suppose you could imagine her recalling a moment of confusion or reflection during her journey, but this is a bit of a stretch.

Overall, the mood is melancholy with some bitterness, but also somewhat dispassionate in recounting the facts of life in this ornate religion. It's a good match with the mood of the song that the game is based on, which insistently asks "What'cha gonna do when the land goes under the water?" almost as a taunt or an accusation, as if you were the cause of the flood that you should have seen coming and now you're doomed. The line "can't go swimming to a big whale's mouth" hints at blame that might be placed on religion in not preparing worshippers for the practical reality of the disaster. It's hard not to read this (both the song and the game) as an allegory for a certain other looming no-longer-deniable calamity...

Everything about this game is charming: the premise (you are a doll who has been enchanted to protect a child of a wealthy magician couple), the setting (the garden estate of said magician couple, populated by various whimsically magical plants), the writing ("The memory rattles like an impervious bumble bee trapped inside a closed book."), and the puzzles, which involve learning about the magical plants and figuring out how to tame them and use them to your advantage. The backstory told through found memories is rather more sinister, however: a ghost story that gives an extra dimension of moral ambiguity to the characters. It also feels a bit like a murder mystery, where you have to put together the clues to identify the villain and motive.

I had trouble with two of the puzzles: one I eventually managed to figure out after some wild guesses about how to use (Spoiler - click to show)the diamondbane-- it seemed like I needed to plant it near the glass wall of the greenhouse, or else use it to scratch the glass somehow, but in fact you had to THROW it at the glass to crack it; the other I had to consult the hints for, but in retrospect it was totally fair and clever to (Spoiler - click to show)reuse the clippers to cut out the cover of the book. Unfortunately the hints file is rather spoilery; it seems formatted so as to be implemented as a hint menu where you can choose to reveal one at a time, but it's just a text file so it's hard to avoid seeing more than you want. Hopefully a post-comp release will implement the hints properly in-game.

I managed to win the game on my first playthrough without having solved one of the puzzles; I'm not sure if this was intentional. If it were, I would have expected the endings to be different whether you (Spoiler - click to show)destroyed the statue or not, where solving this optional puzzle would give you a more satisfying and final epilogue. I was slightly spoiled about this puzzle from the hints file; otherwise I'm not sure I would have thought to (Spoiler - click to show)examine the mansion, since it's physically distant rather than being an object in the room.

I like how the game incorporates the band name as well as the song lyrics. Another nice touch is how (Spoiler - click to show)the child is either Klaus or Klara, determined randomly when you start; this led to a funny moment of confusion when I read Emily Short's review and she mentioned that the child was a girl when he was clearly a boy in my playthrough.