Reviews by AmberShards

I'm not really sure why this game generates the kind of praise it does. Then again, I'm mystified why Shadows on the Mirror and Violet did as well. Masquerade is a lot like Shadows in the sense that if you don't read the author's mind, you'll never make it anywhere in the game. Unlike that game, however, Masquerade mercifully doesn't keep the torment going. If you decide to leave the first room (I was thinking that I'd come back later or maybe look for a side entrance), BOOM, game over. I was shocked and angry, but chastened.

So I tried again, this time using a little more patience. After five minutes of guess-the-verb, I concluded that I'd need a walkthrough to get past the first puzzle. As a rule, I loathe walkthroughs, but I absolutely will not use one for the first puzzle. Why is it that IF romances are all such tortures?

What I saw of the game balanced out its sparkling prose and interesting PC with a horrifically frustrating gameplay. I don't know if the rest of Masquerade is just as vexing, but I didn't want to find out.

Have you ever received an elegant box, to discover that it held socks or worse, underwear? Words Get Twisted... is like that, only the underwear is your stoner uncle Eddies' and it's been worn continuously since 1967. Let me explain.

The box is unique, even clever. The z-machine is used to encourage the reader (yes, the reader, not the player) to explore several poems. However as interesting as the device is, the content is what makes or breaks the experience. So what is the content?

The content can at best be described as retread. By far the most original poem is the word-repetition description of a storm, which is effective once, and then loses its flavor. The other poems are standard leftist hackery. Yup, it's time for more boring preachments about how military power is evil and how war will destroy us all. Seriously, you've read the same sentiments only better executed everywhere else in pop culture. It's also worth pointing out that the poems are not connected by theme, style, or meter (they are all freeverse).

So in short, this fancy box contains fruitcake.

I suppose on the continuum of IF players, I'm almost the direct opposite of "puzzle fiend". As a result, I was hesitant to play this game, but I let the glowing reviews of others seduce me into trying.

About ten minutes in, I was reminded why I hate most puzzles: they aren't puzzles, per se, but guesswork requiring large leaps of logic. Lord Bellwater's Secret (LBS herein) commits the unforgivable crime of requiring the player to guess numbers to solve a puzzle. (Spoiler - click to show) It's not that the actual idea of the lord's birthdate as the combination to the safe is unrealistic. It's that you have to guess that those numbers are the ones that he used, and if you guess wrong, the safe, the character, the narrator, all give you no feedback. Nothing in the game even hints that the lord used those dates for the safe. You just couldn't logically get from here to there!

The plot progresses through random discovery of items by the character, which is a salient failure in this game. Despite LBS being a mystery, there's no sense of one thing leading to the next. It's all guesswork on behalf of the player which results in a discovery that gives up the next bit of information that doesn't seem connected in any way to what happened before. It's a bit too random. It's odd, but in this case, a more linear gameplay would have worked better. (Spoiler - click to show) And time travel? That was another maddening example of randomness. It's a time travel that works one time, and it is seemingly irreversible.

What other reviews have noted about the quality of the writing stands; it is wholly immersive. The same goes for navigation through the room. The character glides effortlessly from one part of the room to the other. As far as objects go, I didn't discover any purple prose; everything that is described you can examine or manipulate in some way. There are a few bugs in the parser, and they can prove annoying (for instance, how do you look out the window?). LBS does feature hints, but having to resort to hints, for me, is a sign that I'm in over my head.

I think you need to enjoy puzzles more than the average player, or be steeped in the tropes of mystery fiction to appreciate this game. If you are not, you won't have the background to intuit a successful action. You'll be stuck guessing numbers.

Every Day the Same Dream starts off with a run-on sentence and the main character in his bedroom, apparently late. If you're not enthused by this setup, EDSD may not be the game for you, because it improves only slightly as far as I could tell. If you tough it out, you'll find more grammatical problems, unresponsive NPCs, room exits that aren't described (as in the kitchen), waiting that produces no results when you'd expect it to (breakfast is NEVER served here!), and my favorite: things that happen without the game telling you (such as the elevator door closing). On the bright side, the game has a slight surrealistic feel, but that also serves to make the lack of response to most anything you do even more frustrating.

While this seems to be the author's maiden voyage, EDSD should have been tested by someone other than the author. Maybe time constraints were the reason why. At any rate, in the future I hope that the author allows others to test his game, if only to avoid the stigma of unhappy reviews and low ratings.

I wanted to love Panic; I really did. It has everything that a horror fan like myself digs -- gloomy and morbid atmosphere, to-die-for writing, intricately detailed items, and the shadow of undying truth. Unfortunately, the puzzles are fiendishly difficult, and the first one is the worst. All the reviews I could find indicated the the players needed the walkthrough for the very first puzzle. Yeah, you read that correctly. For. The. Very. First. Puzzle.

Needless to say, I looked high and low for this walkthrough, but the website that hosts it no longer exists. Apparently no-one else commented on it in RGIF, either. So, I'm stuck with no way forward. What else is interesting about Panic?

It's written in ADRIFT, which usually sends me screaming the other direction. There is some purple prose (the altar, for instance), and it looks like the parser gets confused about parts of the organ. Besides that, the number of parser issues are so small that you'd be hard pressed to guess that ADRIFT was underneath it all.

The intro is a little strange, too, as it consists of sentences that scroll across the screen slowly. You must press a key to advance to the next sentence. On the Mac, only Spatterlight plays it correctly (MacScare doesn't work).

I wish I could say more, but unless you happened to get ahold of the walkthrough sometime in the past, you'd best leave Panic alone.

Zegrothenus was a real learning experience for me -- mostly about how long things actually take, and secondarily about the massive complexity of any IF authoring system, but I6 in particular. I had to fight against my instincts every step of the way. There's not a lot of rooms; there is no epic sweep and only a little bit of symbolism and theme. In retrospect, it's also probably more frustrating than it needs to be. If I had to rate it myself, I'd put it at 3.5 or 4 stars on the basis of the writing quality and the nice touches, and take points off for the frustration factor.

In one sense, the game is a typical "escape the room" setup, although escaping in this case depends upon creating a potion to prove your worth as a wizard. It's a complex affair because you don't remember making the potion and you only have so much time. The timer runs backwards, showing how much time you have left, and the points correspond to your progress on the potion.

There are no hunger puzzles, but several timed puzzles show up. The NPCs can frustrate your progress, and it is possible to lose all your progress in the game via the actions of an NPC. With that said, Zegro provides warnings and clues that should allow most players to avoid the consequences of the timed puzzles, and the timing is generous.

Zegro provides cluing at the macro level as well the micro level, although probably not enough at the micro level. (I really didn't want to hold the player's hand, though. Who knows where it had been?). It also places the characters in a distinctive larger world, and that's something that very few one-room games even attempt. Humor is used throughout, but it is an acquired taste, and one that hinges upon reading the About section. If you miss that, you'll probably feel insulted.

So, black sheep or crazy uncle, this game is probably one that will appreciated by only a few people.

The Golden Shadow provides a faintly interesting premise: a gilded room and a man that cannot remove his top hat. Throw in a darkly enchanting poem and you have several elements that could result in a taut and eerie game. However, that's not what the Golden Shadow is. Instead, the Golden Shadow is another frustrating excursion into the land of one-roomed-ness. After not being able to examine anything -- even after turning off the lamp -- I resorted to the walkthrough. The very first line involves a vague verb that years of IF schooling have taught me never to use. Given that I would have never resorted to that verb, and that the game told me to do something which it then told me was impossible, I just gave up.

Given that this is the first outing by the author, the problems here derive from simply not knowing or a lack of time instead of a desire to maul the audience. There's a few things that could be done to improve the game -- a couple rounds of copyediting and more clueing, for instance. It's a shame to waste a good setup, so I do hope that the author returns to this game and polishes it up a bit.

Or, if you're less of an intellectual, it's an office game where nothing you do matters and it repeats forever. Oh, and the point of the game is fighting the parser. With that said, there's not much hope for this game to please anyone except possibly masochists. Even the score is futile -- zero out of zero points if you "win" (and by "winning" I mean, giving in to the parser).

As far as depressing goes, this is not very depressing, but rather tedious; to really convince us of the depressing nature of the situation, more is required. Aren't most of us familiar with the office life anyways?

This doesn't get close to the satirical fun of SuperMarket Robbery, and it's not even as interesting as Magic Travels. (If you know the latter game, that's how uninteresting this one is).

So, this game is complete, small, and falls short of the mark of the author's other works.

Fear does a lot of things right. It is darkly atmospheric, yet not plotless; the plot provides a reason for the puzzles; in-line hints are available (word to the wise: HINT works; HINTS does not).

However, Fear also does quite a few things wrong. The puzzles are fiendishly difficult and their unclued nature only added to the problem. Worse, when you do use the hints, you'll find that the solutions often turn upon either guessing the verb or manipulating objects in wholly unexpected ways. (Spoiler - click to show)If I can't manipulate the statues, for instance, why the heck would I think about MOVING them? At times, it betrays its age with the lack of synonyms and purple prose.

Fear is a game that I spent hours upon before eventually giving up. It's a shame, really, because the game welds atmosphere and challenge in a way that only the best games have ever done (for example, Zork I). In most games, puzzles are artificial, inorganic constructs that don't flow from the premise and pace of the game; not so here. They are fully organic, just far too difficult to be enjoyable.

I think even the game designer knew that he might have amped the difficulty past the pain point; look at the detail of the hints to see for yourself.

Lack of Vision consists of an awesome introduction and very little after that: no plot, no puzzles, and only four rooms. Those rooms consist of the game telling you that you can't see. Nice, but I figured that out in the first 10 seconds of playing. If it's supposed to be a joke, what it's supposed to parody has been lost in the sands of time along with the humor. If this was a Speed IF entry or an IntroComp, it'd still rank lowly; as it stands, I guess we're supposed to be happy that the intro finishes? I want that minute of my life back!