Ratings and Reviews by Ron Newcomb

This is the first I-F I have ever played to completion, and the one to make me take notice of the form. In Bronze, you are Beauty, of the classic fairy tale Beauty and the Beast, and after a week-long "vacation" to visit your old family, you return to the castle to find something amiss.

This game is intended for those of us new to interactive fiction. Puzzles have multiple solutions, multiple puzzles are open to the player at once, no time limits, hints are built-in, even the most basic I-F commands can be listed for those completely new to I-F, the writing is solid, the difficulty is on the easier side, and exploration produces a strong sense of place while maintaining the fairy tale's soft lucidness. And, commands new to the form, such as GO TO, remove a lot of the tedium of the old-school games.

I strongly recommend Bronze to those friends and family who may enjoy a textual video game, but whom would have little patience with the intentionally frustrating and pedantic I-Fs of old.

Suzanne Britton's "Worlds Apart" was the first interactive fiction I ever played, and it remains, to date, my favorite work as far as quality of writing goes. Its gameplay is relatively free of annoyances such as hunger puzzles and sudden death syndrome, which is notable considering it dates from 1999. I had some guess-the-word problems playing, though some of them were intentional puzzles.

I recommend this game to any player of at least moderate experience playing I-F.