Ratings and Reviews by AmberShards

Awakening is a fair effort, and the first effort (to my knowledge) by Pete Gardner. Giving away the plot would give away the game, but let's just say it's a believable -- in the horror genre anyways -- amnesia scenario. Don't let that scare you off, though. The game has a dreary atmosphere and a few puzzles that compensate.

Also, Awakening is a short game. Most players should be able to finish in under 30 minutes; and 30 minutes feels just about right. If it was any longer, it would seem forced.

As far as mechanics go, some important details aren't clued well. Disambiguation problems crop up (especially when entering places). A rather nasty bug late in the game allows you to put the game in an unwinnable state. This area is the game's weakest.

Despite the dreary atmosphere, Awakening didn't really resonate emotionally. The areas that it paints will stay with you, but you'll remember them as you do a house tour and not as a story. The lack of NPCs may be also to blame here.

On the whole, it's a fair game for a first effort. If you've got a few minutes on a rainy day, check it out.

I'm not sure how you rate an intro speed IF; such games don't even attempt to be full games, and as Speed IF, they are typically chock-full of flaws that the designer just didn't have time to correct. Rating such games requires the reviewer to abandon applying a single metric to his reviews, if nothing else. What a five-star intro Speed IF game is, could in no way be a five-star finished, full game.

However, as Speed IF goes, 2007 seemed to be a good year; both this game (abbreviated D3) and Faett Tiw are much more polished, and hence, game-like, than the usual crop of Speed IF entries. D3 has no typos, and the descriptions are remarkably well-written. Most objects even have at least one non-default response. The puzzles are not well-clued, though, but you can only hope for so much.

D3 is a game told in high Victorian style with more than a nod towards steampunk, told with a humorous, almost over-the-top comedic flair. Objects are necessarily ornate with multiple adjectives. The science is necessarily a pinch shy of alchemy, especially once you factor in the restrictions of the contest. I'm quite fond of the atmosphere and would like to have seen this become a finished game, minus some of the ridiculous contest restrictions.

Reading the other reviews of this game make me believe that the game you can download up and to the right is not the same game that is being reviewed. Here are my reasons: there is no graphical component anywhere in the game (at least not under any Glux interpreter for Mac OS X); you do not place any puzzles in this game -- instead you are someone trying to escape an inescapable cell; others mention a "help manual", but there is no help manual in any of the links above and the game provides no help. So, I'm quite puzzled about what exactly is going on here, but for all intents and purposes, it seems that Lock & Key is just another boring one-room escape game. Maybe if I spent another 2-3 hours I might figure out how to do the impossible, but such challenges always leave me cold. In any case, it gets one star for decent writing, because two stars would be a bit excessive for such an unoriginal concept.

Although tagged as a humorous game, the humor consists of third-grade non-sequiturs, and different ways to die whenever you fail to guess what the author was thinking. Yes, spelling errors show up; no, there are no hints for the puzzles you're trying to solve. The description is right -- it is hard to win, especially when you have no idea what you're supposed to be doing. To call Epyk a humorous game, even a sophomoric humorous game is too kind.

Eric's Gift is a linear and rather stilted example of interactive fiction. The mood it presents is faintly wistful, but too tranquil to inspire much interaction. I suppose that works after a fashion, but what interaction is required is cryptic and not well-clued. As a result you must guess the verb repeatedly or examine everything to progress to the next scene. Not even the inline hint system prevents frustration.

What can you say? It's an Introcomp entry, so it's not finished. It's tough to write a fair review of something that isn't done because you have no idea whether what you experience will be the tenor of the game or whether it will change the further in you get. Honestly, all Introcomp entries should be thrown off this site because there are so many unfinished games here already, but if I tried to wipe this page, I doubt that people would let me.

Anyways, what you have here are three rooms and a quote box in the second one that won't go away until you type in another command. There's nothing new here but the concern for the characters is unusual. You have a sense that things matter and it feels like tragedy. I think this story could end up as a moderately good game, but I'm not sure how long it would be.

I'll admit it; I've never been a fan of Whyld's sparse and over-the-top humorous games, which is why I downloaded this one with a bit of trepidation, even fear. What I discovered was, given the author's previous games, stunningly well-written. The game itself layers the dread stone by stone until you feel the weight of the dread conclusion hurtling at you like a freight train. There's only one problem: a handful of turns before the climax, at the penultimate moment, you are kicked back to a previous scene with no way to escape from it. I really, really, hate to give two stars because the writing is so good, but at least running Spatterlight, you can't finish the game.

I'm wondering what game the other folks reviewed, because the version of Ecdysis available at the download link to the right and up a bit is spartan and under-implemented. I have no problem with games occasionally yielding up gems of purple prose, but this game implements so few objects that virtually everything is purple prose. That's frustrating and especially so when you're trying to avoid the main ending.

The bare-bones prose works until you start actually exploring the rooms and feel the linear plot snug around your neck. Then you wonder why the author couldn't bother implementing default responses and why the game knows so few verbs. Not only that, but objects disappear or appear only when it suits the plot.

As for the alternate endings, I couldn't find them, and after a while of fiddling with the game, I just couldn't see the point in it. It's a horror game and a Lovecraftian one at that, so there's no hope of a happy ending here.

Points for a creepy atmosphere even though the whole Lovecraft approach is tired and kind of silly.