Ratings and Reviews by AmberShards

At first, Passing Familiarity welcomes you in, by presenting you with a sympathetic protagonist. As the game progresses, you find out that is merely a parlor trick, as the protagonist is actually altogether unsympathetic; the welcome is only for the purpose of being stung by barbs.

To be specific, the protagonist begins her story as someone with a faulty memory (yes it's a cliche`, but I don't hold that against the author). Naturally you want to help her recover her memory. Only as you discover more clues to who she is, you really don't want to. Her self-centered sense of entitlement, her anti-Christian bias, and the decided slant of the game towards witchcraft (and all its pagan/Satanic overtones) as opposed to alchemy, magic, or other terms, seals the deal.

You could argue that the characterization of Christianity in the game is merely a characterization of its corruption, and not of its true essence; that's the line that many opponents fall back on when questioned. Of course, the lack of a positive counterpoint and their vehemence reveals that they cannot conceive of any "true essence". The author has every right to make a game with that as a primary component, but a warning would have been nice.

The descriptions are concise with occasional embellishments; they serve well to make the rooms memorable in a few short sentences. There are a multiplicity of objects which would make figuring out what is supposed to do what probably a chore. I can't comment on the other aspects of the game, because I found it simply not worth playing once I knew the protagonist.

This is a warning sign more than an exhaustive review.

One Week occupies the middle ground between light and shadow, between...wait, that's the wrong kind of game. One Week is a fun romp through one week in a teenage girl's life before the Prom AND the SAT. Surprisingly, even though it's a CYOA-type setup (i.e. read lots and choose from a menu to push the plot forward), it doesn't come off as constrictive. Because you are given explicit choices and there's almost always more than one choice, you feel like you are guiding the character's destiny. That stands in stark contrast to games where although you might have more freedom, you feel immobilized in the panic of guess-the-verb or guess-the-topic. (Yes, Shadows on the Mirror, I'm looking at you.)

The writing strikes the perfect tone -- breathless, humorous, fragile, spunky, and 110% sincere. Some of the slang has not fared well, but that's the only fly in the ointment. Some may complain about the lack of "realism" but if you're looking for gritty games, you wouldn't be playing this, anyways. With that said, there are no greater resonances here, and the lack of depth is why One Week gets a solid four instead of a five from me.

Nevertheless, One Week is an enjoyable and entertaining game, worth at least 30 minutes of time to find a few different endings.

I hate conversation-based games. They are, as a rule, claustrophobic to the point of making me feel like a prisoner. This game (abbreviated LIPDJICG...wait, let's just call it Love Is...) proves to be no exception. You'll be stuck playing "guess the conversation topic" with no way to break the cycle until you fumble across some predetermined escape point. Not only that, but the conversations proceed according to some random unknown mechanism -- if you ask Joe about his girlfriend, for instance, it works sometimes, and sometimes not -- not that you'll want to know much about Joe, though. I'll spare you the details, but suffice to say that he is one sick and abusive fellow. This is no auspicious beginning, to be sure. In fact, as game design goes, it's a clunker.

Unfortunately I could never find the conversational exit, and there's only so much cheerleading for abusing people that I can take. There's no horror here, unless you mean the horror that you as the player have to endure: degrading subject material, a horribly broken parser, and a claustrophobia-inducing conversation.

Love Is...is like being trapped in an immersion tank filled with feces.

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.