Reviews by verityvirtue

Smoke and divots and scorching and stinky brimstone – there’s only one thing this could mean.

There has been demons in your garden.

So begins this tale of a God-fearing parish worker whose dog has disappeared. Armed with a motley crew of, uh, vegetables and one puppy, he ventures deep into the depths of Hell. He has to battle various trials and tribulations to get his dog back.

While the premise of the game is rather linear, the puzzles are all fairly straightforward and stand alone. In case you don’t get it, location-based walkthroughs are also available. Some of the puzzles require a small amount of lateral thinking and most will make you smile and go, “Oh, right!”. Although it is possible to die in the middle of the game, abundant contextual hints are provided and it is always possible to undo the mistake. Special mention should go to the endgame, which I thought was (fridge?) brilliance: it was quite a "Why didn't I think of that?!" moment (for me, at least).

There is also some characterisation near the endgame, which provides some background to an otherwise colourless PC and pathos to an otherwise light game. Suitable for those who are just looking for a fun diversion, or who are bad with puzzles.

I was confused at first: "Load configuration file?" Well, okay, once I figured out how to start a game, it seemed like a database of little factoids, seemingly unrelated to each other. Then there were the personal notes, which made the unseen narrator an NPC in its own right. Endling tugs on your heartstrings because the triviality of some of the 'files' contrasts starkly with the gravity of the disaster the narrator alludes to.

Even though there is no story in the traditional sense of the word, even though it basically is a bunch of factoids, it is elegantly written, carefully constructed and moved me to tears.

In this game, you are a bright student, bullied by everyone and desperately lonely. As you are running from a bunch of bullies, you bump into a friendly adult who seems to hold great insight as to your situation.

It mentions (Spoiler - click to show)women in science and has school bullying as its premise, though the former seems almost an afterthought. If either of these were meant to be major themes, neither were developed enough to bind the whole story together.

The whole story seems a bit thin on characterisation and it made it hard for me to empathise with the main character or get emotionally involved in the story, while the dialogue was unsurprising and didn't reveal much about most characters beyond a generic template.

The game has typos and not-very-thoughtful dialogue. Pity: it touched on weighty topics which could have been developed further; the characters, certainly, could have fleshed out more fully.

Ooh-er. This game could probably do with a whole lot of beta-testing.

The writing has a few too many punctuation errors and awkward sentences and capitalisation. Many objects were also implemented with very bare descriptions. It gives the impression of hasty writing and sloppy editing.

Gameplay was somewhat hindered by what are is either a coding problem or a lack of subtlety:
• The laundry list-style listing of room descriptions is quite disconcerting. Logically, one would not list potentially important NPCs (e.g. Watson) along with the debris in the room.

• it is nigh impossible to zoom in into details on individual objects (Spoiler - click to show)-- the scratch markings on the table, for example. Given that this is a mystery, and set in a Sherlock Holmes-esque setting, this makes no sense.

One hopes that in future revisions, the author scrutinizes his writing carefully and plays it through a few times himself. Even cosmetic things like introductory text at the start of the game wouldn't hurt- instead of just dropping the player in with the dead body.

Based on a fairytale, it starts out with the promise of good writing. It doesn't last.

It took me a while to find out how to get somewhere- anywhere. The help menu helpfully suggests that one reads carefully. It may be just me, but there were barely any textual hints, making the solutions to the puzzles presented feel unfair.

There isn’t much of a plot, and even when a quest comes up, it isn’t clear what to do to achieve it. In the end, I only managed to complete the game by reading a transcript and blindly taking things.

Join the author, Joey Jones, on his romp through a list of 10 random games, which IFDB spits out if you’re really bored. It’s an extremely entertaining metafictional game- a game within a game, if you like- and the author’s footnotes add satiric remarks to the sometimes badly written games.

In contrast to some of the games featured, this game is, in fact, well written. No need to worry about illiterate parsers or clunky grammar! At least the author will point them out, say something to make you laugh and carry on. There’s also a helpful ‘hint’ feature to help you out if you’re stuck in one of the ‘games in the game’.