Ratings and Reviews by AmberShards

Initially, The Blind House impresses you, artfully and graciously. The setting is dark, psychological, and constrained, yet sauced in delicious unease. The puzzles are also simple, at first, and even the ones which are not intrigue you instead of frustrate you. The layout of the screen features the game's graphic at the lower right and a graphical map at the lower left -- truly, a revolution in IF branding. Lastly, the main character's main current thoughts are floating just below the status bar. These game mechanics go a long way towards making TBH playable, and memorable, and cement the noir atmosphere.

Then the puzzles get less obvious and my interest wanes. The middle section takes too much time to unriddle and drains the prickly, panicky fear away. I'm also convinced that there's some sort of timing bug -- occasionally Marissa doesn't return (I waited until after 9 PM), and other times she returns after barely thirty moves. Originally, I thought that had Marissa returned earlier, the further revelations of the game would be avoided, but that was only wishful thinking.

The main character grows less likable as she becomes better defined; her thoughts hover upon indecency, and her jealousy of Estelle betrays her attraction to women (it's a jealous madness, but attraction nonetheless). Other scenes reveal this as well, and not in any subtle, interpretable way. The ending scenes make it completely clear. TBH is lesbian noir.

This casts a vomit-colored light upon the rest of the game. The middle section is Helena pawing through the private life of someone that she wishes was her lover. Even the introduction makes more sense -- why were the characters seemingly so close? (Spoiler - click to show)What actually happened last night, except for a lover's fight that turned deadly? The ending does succeed in wrapping things up, although it is anti-climactic, and it assumes a few things that you may not have done.

The writing in many places is taut, eerie, and evocative, but that in no way atones for requiring someone to live inside Helena's skin. That horror remains, like the memory of being deathly sick.

Sometimes the past obscures the purpose of things; I can imagine sifting through an archeological dig and finding common artifacts which although they are mysterious, no-one knows what they are for, and so they are thrown aside. Spectrum is one of those common ancient artifacts. It's curious, but you have no idea what it's for, and that leaves you with apathy.

To say much about this game is to reveal its central conceit, which is that of an emotional color wheel. You can pick up metaphysical objects and move them around, although where you're supposed to place them is a matter of "guess where you drop things". I know it's only SpeedIF, but this format has seen some pretty good games -- think of You are a Chef!, for instance. Spectrum provides a great premise and goes nowhere with it. The lack of implementation is sorely missed, here. I wish more authors would understand this: if you're creating a different-than-usual world, it needs to be immersive or the player won't get it. The normality of standard responses will suck away attention and he won't be able to reason as though he was bound and circumscribed by your world.

Anyhow, for additional discomfort, the game features profanity and a subtle anti-Christian dig. If you feel like playing "drop objects in random places" or "guess the verb" you might find more of the same -- that was no inducement for me to continue. Caught between boredom and offensive material, I wandered off to find something else to do.

The problem with Snatches is that it lets a good idea get in the way of a good game.

The original approach intrigues, and then frustrates, and then you realize that you're along for the ride. There's no way out, no way off the rails, and the game consists of walking straight into the creature's clutches again and again. I can't say that's terribly satisfying from a playability perspective; the fact that the technique gets tired about the seventh time that you've experienced it doesn't help. (Spoiler - click to show)Really, did I have to be the dog? Talk about overusing a technique!

Anyway, Snatches gets props for being a horror game and not a Lovecraftian horror game. Its theme and tone remind me of the X-Files. The different characters perceive the world in vastly different ways according to their experiences and physical characteristics, and that's tough to pull off.

The first line is chilling and evocative, which makes what comes after a plunge into the mundane. The lower-cased room names and the minimal room descriptions suggest the feeling of loss, and the character's inability to put together obvious clues suggest his frame of mind. The lack of objects and their responses continue this tone. The room descriptions reveal the story in reverse -- a neat trick. On the whole, this works; it's just a bit too soap-opera-ish.

Is all well that ends well? Depending on how much you've explored, the violently short ending is either ironic or extremely ironic. The author doesn't use this setup to bash men though, so that's a nice surprise. Still, it feels too minimal.

With that aside, the game holds together well, emotionally. It is short because it needs to be short; it could have been long only as farce. The only detractors are a few grammar problems, a little vagueness about what to do next, and the brevity of the ending. The Argument is not revolutionary, but it does capture a moment in time fairly well.

Here's another entrant in the long line of games never betatested before release. How can I be that confident in such a statement? The first line has a typo. So does the third. Then there's the hyphenated soda-bottle, the run-on sentences, and missing capitalization. Things like this make me want to claw my eyes out, because it appears that the author couldn't bother to polish his prose, much less let anyone else play the game before unleashing it. It stinks of laziness.

Anyhow, the unnecessary tutorial appears out of nowhere, rewarding you without informing you what you're supposed to do, and then teleports in objects. At least it solves a bizarre puzzle which could otherwise only be explained by revealing that the PC had twisted and evil parents or that the PC had emotional issues.

The setup is a few notches better than "escape the room"; instead, it's "escape the house". You start off in your bedroom. The room descriptions are standard fare, with a bare minimum of atmosphere and occasionally wry insights. The detached cave-crawl perspective, however, tends to leave a lot of things up in the air. For instance, do you know the woman in the kitchen? Is she some stranger that just wandered in and started to make food? What about the girl in the living room, and why does she speak with a British accent? The perspective doesn't work in settings where you'd expect the PC to have some background knowledge. If Sara is his sister, why not just describe her initially as "your sister, Sara"? Such clues don't need to be paragraphs, but cluing in the player makes the game feel true to life.

The rest of the game is best described as an exercise in examining all objects and doing weird things with them. You're forced into this because purple prose is everywhere and because the game world makes no sense. Also, to compound the frustration, there aren't actually any inline hints.

Perhaps this game is winnable, but after 100 turns of increasing rage, I gave up. I have a suspicion that were I to succeed, though, the payoff would not be a sufficient recompense for my effort.

It's only the last puzzle that's not forgivable (more on that in a bit). The rest of the game is fine, and fairly solid for a first release. The cover art effectively sets the tone. The room descriptions aren't ornate, but they get the job done. Again, effective is probably the best way to characterize them. Even the concept that kicks off the game works.

However, there are problems: missing punctuation, forbidden actions, stock responses, parser problems, and a heck of a lot of loose ends. The forbidden actions are what got to me. You're trapped in a cabin, but you can't break the windows? You can't do violent things to vulnerable parts of doors? It just didn't make sense. Most people would do those things in such a situation and make their escape fairly quickly. That leads us to the huge, honking annoyance in the center of the room: the last puzzle.

The last puzzle is one of these intricate affairs that involves doing a lot of nonstandard things with a door. You're fought by the parser, whose responses (when they make sense) lead you to believe that you can't do what you end up needing to do. When you do those things, strangely, the effects are not mentioned in the room description. Fortunately, the game provides hints. Unless you have immense patience, you'll need them.

For a first time out, Safe is not bad. If the game were beta-tested, I have no doubt that the vast majority of these problems would have been corrected. In any case, I'm looking forward to more from this author.

Reading the description of the game, I wasn't sure if So Reality was trying to be cute, the author's native language wasn't English, or she got bored while making the game. I was hoping for "cute". I got "got bored while making the game".

The game itself uses the same style of writing (that is to say, run-on sentences galore), with bare-bones implementation, and a distressing lack of capitalization. It feels like a hand-me-down. Things don't fit, don't make sense, and are there just because they are.

The first puzzle (perhaps the only puzzle) involves (Spoiler - click to show)apparently a deaf-mute maid who "grabbs" you. I think the author meant for us to keep trying random verbs until we found one that worked, as neither you, the maid, nor the kitchen has any meaningful description.

So Reality proved to be neither witty enough nor enough of a train wreck to hold my interest.

Whenever I play a game that makes big-time typos (roll playing) and tells me I have scored more than it was possible to score, I know that I'm in for a bad time. Such is the case with Necron's Keep, another game in the long list of games that have never graced a beta-tester's fingertips.

Despite the typo, the game starts well, nearly very well. However, once the intro text is done, you're in a forest missing your sense of direction. That's not very realistic or very entertaining. In fact, it's straight out of the instadeath (TM) school of bad DMing. You remember those DMs, don't you? The sadists who took particular delight in killing off characters that took you months to level? Necron's Keep steals a few ideas from their campaigns.

But wait, there's combat, a true test of any role-playing game. This system seems to be based on the AD&D system, but Necron's Keep informs you of the Actual Die Rolls. Yes. When you attack, you get to read your to hit die roll, the monster's to hit die roll, and the die rolls for the damage! That just doesn't make for a good gaming experience, and decent DMs didn't tell the players about the mechanics anyways. They'd say something like, "The kobold is really staggering now, after your mace connected with his skull."

But that's not the only annoying thing about the combat system. There's the assumption that your character always attacks whatever baddies he finds, which means when you're wounded, you'll soon be dead. That's right. In Necron's Keep, a character with half of his hp gone automatically attacks anything he finds!

Then there other gameplay issues -- for example, not being able to use undo even though the option is provided when you die. When you pick up objects, the game tells you the room from which they were picked up; why that is necessary, I don't know. That along with combat might lead you to think that information overload rules the day. Not so. Most of the information provided is useless or annoying, yet the help is a threadbare affair. What's really happening is a kind of textual anorexia nervosa.

The descriptions are decent (except for one plagiarized from Zork), but the grammar is haphazard at best with typos, misused words, missing punctuation marring the experience. The points and what they do are obscure, the puzzles simple, and the combat, maddening.

All in all, Necron's Keep comes across as half-baked. I'm sure that the author can polish this, and I encourage him to do so; until then, there are just too many typos, bugs, and annoyances to make it worth your while.