Ratings and Reviews by Doug Orleans

I enjoyed this as a word puzzle, but the IF game wrapper didn't add much and in fact made it a little more awkward.

Caveat: I still haven't finished this game... Right now I am close to being stuck, but I have not yet looked at the hints.

The setting is somewhat hackneyed but appealing to me: a dystopian future surveillance state, where the PC is part of a secret rebellion and receives instructions to help him escape. The world is pretty detailed, though there's not much backstory that I've noticed so far.

The puzzles are mostly technological, involving microchips and soldering irons and radio transmitters and microwave ovens... Many of the puzzles have involved some satisfying aha!-moments, and so far they've all been pretty fair, but it's possible that I may change my mind after reading hints for stuff I'm stuck on.

There are a few NPCs, though interaction with them is fairly limited (as far as I've seen). They are mostly one-dimensional, though not particularly stereotyped.

The writing is nothing extraordinary, but it paints a solid picture of life in this world, with some snarky references to issues in our current time (typical for these sorts of stories). There are also several links to various pieces of fiction on the web that the author has written; those have generally been somewhat interesting but not really my thing, but they're also not at all required to solve the game (again, as far as I've seen...).

The implementation and description is rather sparse, though it's quite a large game so it's not that surprising; if the author is interested in releasing new editions, I would recommend a few more passes at filling in some of the gaps, and also perhaps reducing the size of the map: there seems to be a few too many rooms that don't contain anything interesting. In particular, it can be a bit tedious to get from one end of the map to the other (especially when that involves having to take the train), which seems to be required a number of times in order to collect items to solve puzzles in the necessary order. Maybe just some shortcut commands would help there, though.

Overall, I've enjoyed playing Valley of Steel, and I am curious to find out both how to solve the puzzles I'm stuck on and how the story continues. The sparseness is the main thing keeping me from giving this 5 stars.

As a Firefly fan, I enjoyed the writing and the references, and I don't usually enjoy fanfic at all. The puzzles were easy for the group (Club Floyd) but may be a bit trickier for solo play. But they were fair, forgiving, and made sense (although mostly of the "decide which object you have is the one you need to use" variety). The game was very linear with lots of sitting back and watching the story play out, but I didn't mind because the writing was good and the story was entertaining-- felt like a typical light-hearted episode of the show. There were a few minor bugs (we played Release 2) but they didn't get in the way of the game, just some rough edges showing. I'm very curious to know who wrote this and whether they're planning another Firefly game!