Reviews by AmberShards

Sometimes, although rarely, less is more. Hauntings shows that the old advertising bromide is occasionally right -- it has just enough atmosphere to be evocative, using restraint where one could easily freefall into gothic excess. Although some rooms are too minimally described, most are just right, as in the case of the Sickroom. The pacing is questionable, but not overly frustrating, and the characterization is solid, at least until the end. One of the characters (Spoiler - click to show) (Leonara) isn't given the detail she deserves, and that diminishes the game a bit.

The parser occasionally refers to an object that isn't around, and some actions are unnecessarily clumsy (Spoiler - click to show) such as giving items to your employer, but on the whole, the parser works as you expect. There is a dramatic scene late in the game where everything rests upon yes/no responses, but it doesn't feel fake in the slightest. I hesitated for moments, thinking through what would happen if I said "yes" or "no". What resulted from that scene led me to two different endings, one of which was rather by-the-numbers, but the other was emotionally resonant.

Finally, Hauntings is a fairly short game, almost creeping up into the low end of medium length. It's an enjoyable, atmospheric piece that only loses its punch at the end. Not bad for a first outing. I look forward to more of what the author has in store.

Despite the Romantic sensibilities of the title, The Last Dark Day is anything but a Romantic, Gothic tour-de-force. It is a small, linear experience (not much of a game) that ends right about the time you've figured things out. You can't do much and waiting will effectively win the game the same as if you did anything. If the author wanted to convey a sense of helplessness or resignedness to fate, there must be better ways to convey it. On the plus side, this could have ended not as happily, so two stars for the implicit message.

Growing Up, in its understated pathos, is a game that could have been great. It still could be, if the author wanted to go back and do a few rounds of polishing. What sinks it is the usual IF maladies: lack of grammar and lack of implementation. The lack of object/scenery implementation isn't so bad due to the way that time advances in the game, but just a little bit more would have made all the difference.

The descriptions here are just enough to whet your appetite, and they are delivered from an unusual perspective; the tone is wryly humorous spiced with a bit of timeless sorrow. Thankfully, no profanities, porn, or gore screw it up.

Growing Up has been tagged with multiple endings, but I can't get the full 70 points (50 is my record), and that's after dying at least 20 times. Perhaps they are there; perhaps not.

The only thing that leaves me unsettled about the game -- and perhaps we're supposed to feel this way -- is the things that you can't do. Without giving away too much, times where you want to help one of the other characters abound, and yet, we're unable to help. Some of this is the fault of the underimplemented parser, and that's the part of the game that really needs work. You will be guessing the verb a bit, even if it's in vain.

Anyhow, I'd love to give this game four (or maybe five) stars because it held so much promise, but the parser keeps it out of that territory. It's worth playing at least five times, though, despite its shortcomings.

I have to admit that I was hesitant to play this game, and even more hesitant once I had cruised over to the web site. I was expecting a full-bored feminist assault. What I discovered was a rather retiring, unfinished endeavor.

RFTOL (amusingly similar to ROTFL) proceeds in a CYOA type fashion, with the curious use of the letter "n" to advance. You can choose one of four candidates, then a political party, and that's where RFTOL begins to break down. If you don't choose one of the major parties, then the game continues just as if you had. I'm not sure how later options, such as choosing a campaign manager, impact the final result. The tone of the game is straight ahead, although a little reserved. If you're expecting a slice of life in the wheeling, dealing, dirty tricks, high-pressure game of politics, this is not your game.

I ended the game with a score of 0 out of a possible 0 (always a sure sign of incompleteness), trapped in the darkness, and carrying a professional campaign manager.

Run for the Oregon Legislature! is interesting, but unfinished.

You know you're in for rough waters when the very first screen of a game drops the f-bomb on you. As you might expect, things don't get better. All the usual grammatical sins abound: misuse of ellipses, forgotten hyphens, missing apostrophes, you name it -- it's here. And what's up with the weird listing of scenery objects like doors and such as if they were moveable objects?

The paper-thin plot trundles along, stopping only long enough to diss the elderly. (Spoiler - click to show)(Try examining the table in the cabin.) The game, as its name might suggest, consists of objects and areas lifted from other games: the grate from Adventure and the cabin-cum kitchen from Zork. Adventure Time also features an annoying maze through rooms that differ only in their names (as if we needed another annoying maze), a very shortly-timed lantern, and no way to proceed past a certain point. (Spoiler - click to show)Once you use the well, there is no way to get back underground, and no way past the castle. I agree with the other reviewer -- Adventure Time isn't finished, but even if it was, it's not worth playing. AT is a ripoff of better games, pastiched together with stock locations without any sense of atmosphere, plot, or theme.

As ideas go, Inspiration! is a novel one, bringing the game within a game concept home with aplomb. As games go, Inspiration! is decidedly ok. The humor is in the silly and exuberant type vein (enjoyable in small doses, but your mileage may vary), and the room descriptions are minimal, but it's really the structure that annoyed me.

You are looking for inspiration to write your IF game, and so you set out to look for it around your house. I didn't mind the random actions you do to find inspiration; it's the fact that when you come back to the office to write your game, you write and the game ends -- boom. You'd better have a decent score before you get there, as you get one shot at it.

On the plus side, the game is fairly easy and there's no trash. It's also short, so you probably won't spend a lot of time trying to puzzle things out. I scored 25/40 on my first time through, and even that was a surprisingly positive ending.

On the negative side, Inspiration! is a story about finding inspiration, but itself does not inspire. It's basically a better-than-average "explore your own house" setup without any enduring themes.

If you're in the mood for something light-hearted and silly by turns, Inspiration! is just the thing.

Yet again, I'm underwhelmed by games everyone else loves -- not so much for the technical aspects, but for the content. That's precisely the joy of this game: facile and mindless "peace" sentiments coupled with some arguably anti-American stereotypes. (Spoiler - click to show)Herein, the UK has a space program, and America decides to attack one of their outposts. Yes, yes. It's more of the same thing we see every day. I guess nothing much has changed in the future!

At any rate, until those aspects of the plot show up, there's nothing but quality. The puzzles are challenging but not impossible; the descriptions are spartan but serviceable; the flashbacks provide the reason for your actions and enough backstory to keep you interested. Even the amnesia makes sense and doesn't feel trite.

As far as making use of the "escape the room" mentality, Fragile Shells does a good job of it. There are enough "rooms" so that you don't feel hemmed in, and yet, you do feel the need to escape. Your situation is dire, but yet communicated without annoying timers and suchlike.

However, the characterization is inconsistent (no particularly English, Scottish, etc dialog is used), and the story is largely unemotional. Also, you won't find out the content until late in the game, but be aware that it is coming.

On one hand, I can see why this placed so high in the Jay is Games comp: it's well-designed and the puzzles are challenging without being unfair. On the other hand, I can see why this placed high in the Jay is Games comp: it feeds the insatiable hatred of the envious and the jealous.

Snack Time! is a cute game where you are a dog and your pet is a human. The atmosphere and the sense of immersion come off without a hitch; even the frustration at getting the human to obey is endearing, up to a point. Unfortunately, that point comes fairly soon.

The game is not an exploration game, so it does feel close and small. That, coupled with the lack of items to manipulate, begins the first fire of frustration. The second major puzzle throws kindling on that fire, because to solve it you must do something non-obvious three times in a row. It's also not helpful that doing that is the only way to advance the plot; time itself doesn't advance the plot and it really should. (Spoiler - click to show)In other words, you can wait forever, and the human will never exit the bathroom.

Other puzzles are similarly bizarrely solved. Even after looking at the walkthrough, what I was doing didn't seem to have any connection to getting what I wanted.

All the pieces of the puzzle of a good game are here, but Snack Time! mashes them together in a way that make no sense to me.

When I first heard of this game, I felt celebratory. Someone made a game for the Apple II! Yes! There's even special IIGS features! So, I reacquainted myself with the pain of getting files from the interweb on to my IIGS, and some time later, I was ready to roll. The game installed on a single 3.5". While not quite as nostalgic as a 5.25" on which I played Zork and Adventure, it'd have to do.

Then, disappointment struck. The game was in 40 columns, instead of 80? The room description displayed every time you did something, like the all-time king of suck, The Mist? Oh noooo. I grit my teeth and played on.

It turns out that the game is a strange mix of technical competence and storytelling meh. Leadlight uses some kind of handrolled system, and that increases my respect for the programmer quite a bit. However, this system suffers from the fatal two-word parser disease. The color-changing background to match your status (only on the IIGS?) is a nice touch. The main menu, the ability to save games, and so forth demonstrate that the system was well-thought through and gives players the usual fundamentals. I especially appreciate the warning screen at the beginning; it's only fair to let players know what they are in for. Good job, for the most part.

Now, about the meh. The storytelling is ok, I suppose; it's not literary and it's not campy-disposable. However, it's not very revealing about the monsters that you face, and as a result, it's not frighting. The reason why you're at a private boarding school and your melencholy/disturbed nature is a gold mine to lay on the atmosphere and the psychological insights, but that opportunity was passed by. Overall, the impact is not even leaden. It's just present the way that a ham sandwich is present. Even the RPG-ish battles felt lackluster.

Now if this was all there was to Leadlight, then I'd walk away with a feeling of discontent; however, one item propelled my discontent into full-bore anger: the deathtraps. Leadight is a game where you *must* save early and save often, because the nonsensical deathtraps will get you every time. The warnings you receive are cryptic and compel further investigation, but you'd better not investigate, because then you'll die. That sucks. It all started to remind me of the bad DMs I had played with who delighted in punishing players through such devices, and a whole host of lame MUDs I'd played on. The rage and the disappointment I'd much rather forget, but this game brought it all back.

Upon realizing the pain that was in store for me, I gave Leadlight the old heave-ho.

Metal fatigue often results in catastrophic failure. Bridges that seemed strong instantly give way. Structures collapse without warning. So it is with Gris et Jaune, one of many victims of the IF analog -- contest deadline.

I'm especially biased about this game, because I helped playtest it, and that makes my disappointment that it wasn't ever fixed more intense than usual. As others have noted, the first few moves are spellbinding. In fact, all of the scenes that occur until you leave the house are gripping and memorable. I haven't played this game in several months, and yet upon first firing it up, the images and the suffocating emotions claw their way up from the bottom of my chest. Playing again, I am reminded of the stark, beautiful, and bizarre imagery. Simply, the atmosphere and the descriptions here are par excellance.

The problem is that the game starts to falter about halfway through and it collapses once you leave the house. It becomes painfully obvious in the latter scenes that the same level of polish wasn't applied. The descriptions become cardboard generic; you can do things without penalty that really should end the game, and the endings are lackluster. (The game devolves into crude language at this point, as well, which in addition to being lame by itself, just doesn't flow with the dialog and style previously established.) Finally, the plot just unwinds and meanders, leaving you stranded and confused about what to do next.

There are many games that deserve to be polished and/or completed, but few of them literally beg to be. Gris et Jaune is one of those few.

Wetlands is one of the rare games that sticks in your mind after you step away from the computer; the mysterious symbology, the unique atmosphere, the timeless feel -- all of these work together to evince a vivid, wistful, everlasting poignancy also created by the Zork series, The Moonlit Tower, Myst, and very few other games. The writing is simply fantastic (with the exception of an unnecessary profanity). The atmosphere rotates around water and wood -- ponds, beaches, forests, driftwood, dried leaves, rusty pipes, and so forth. The language is evocative but not to Romantic excess; it is quietly balanced and enduring.

The basic plot is that you are seeking the Crystal City -- a perhaps-legendary water-city, possibly magical, possibly quite advanced. You have narrowed its location down to the Waterworks, an water processing facility consisting of a pond, a few buildings, and the surrounding woods. Of course, you will not leave until you have discovered the city.

In contrast to the plot and the atmosphere, the puzzles are for the most part im-poss-ible. They are not clued whatsoever, and the game provides no direction as to what you're supposed to do next. Yes, you could argue that echoes Zork, and while the lack of cluing leads you to explore more, you are hampered by Wetlands' linear plot. Lack of cluing plus a linear plot yields frustration, whereas in more exploration-type games, it does not. I'm also not too impressed by the NPCs. They are well-characterized, but completely unhelpful, and there are no built-in hints.

I didn't make it very far -- only to the status "starting to trickle" -- but I don't think I will be able to proceed any further than that. Given that the game has a few other minor errors, proceeding might not be possible. It probably is, but I don't know for sure. If for no other reason, play this for the atmosphere.

To be sure, Gigantomania is realistic. You can feel it in your pores like sodden air. It also authentically Russian, with realistic detail, and all manners of dark humor and deception. However, as a game, Gigantomania falls short.

The plot slowly unfurls the corrupt nature of communism in every strata of society across separate scenes, linked together only via the main characters as types of workers that embody that failed totalitarian system. Although that abstract (instead of personal) linkage may well radiate the cold cruelty of Stalin's Russia, it does not build a strong plot. It also dries up the wells of sympathy which are engaged when you know more of the character by being in his or her skin for an appreciable length of time.

The puzzles themselves are fairly easy except for the ending puzzle in the third scene, which I could not solve; that there is a fourth scene suggests that this is possible, although it would be far more realistic if there were there no solution -- making every ending a win, or perhaps a loss.

Grammar problems occasionally crop up in Gigantomania, but there are no coding errors that I discovered. In the first scene, depending on what you do, you will find a character that delivers a horribly profane monologue. While I understand his desperation, it says little for the authors' creativity that they chose to reveal it in this way. I could easily conceive of his words delivered through clenched teeth as being more forceful without such.

In the end, I'm not sure how well Gigantomania works as a game; it is like several mini-games in one, connected abstractly to one another. The subject matter is a very much overlooked era of history, but this and the oppressive atmosphere still don't compensate for the lack of unity and the lack of plot. So, my hat's off for the authors sticking a thumb in the eye of those who whitewash history, but I hope that they pay more attention to game aspects in future releases.

For what it is, Escape in the Dark is fine -- a low-key, almost spartan, escape-the-room type game, done with style and a hint of atmosphere. The puzzles are challenging, but not brain straining, and they all make sense. I felt the atmosphere was a bit lacking, and the ending was just kinda there -- it didn't seem the adequately reward the player for making it through.

It's short and it's better than most escape-the-room setups; serviceable is what I'd say, and that's neither a slam nor praise.

Divis Mortis is in a word, split-personality. The first few moves reveal a stomach-wrenching experience and with that out in the open, you think you know what kind of ride you're in for. But you're wrong, because then the silly one-liners show up. Danielle is right. These attenuate the horror instead of amping it up. Lynnea, if you're listening, we can handle it. True horror fans don't need lighter elements. Give us the soul-soaking dread and doom of pure zombie madness. Ahem.

Yes, this game is a zombie survival game, but more fair and playable than some others of the genre (Resident Evil series, I'm looking at you). It's a richly-detailed world, and the author knows her medical terminology. The descriptions are succinct, sometimes cold, but always sufficient. The puzzles range from fairly simple to medium difficulty, with the exception of one which requires the hints.

Anyways, Divis Mortis (cool name BTW) has some other problems. These are mostly grammatical, but occasionally, are more serious. For instance, you can escape one particular zombie simply by running past him, even though your character is rooted to the spot in dread. That zombie then disappears. He's nowhere to be found. Another rather serious issue involves the order in which you do certain things. (Spoiler - click to show)It turns out that you need to retrieve an item from your car; however, if you barricade the doors to the outside first, you can never get back out to get to your car. Yet another issue involves (Spoiler - click to show)what happens to the lamp once you drop it into the basement. The basement has light, but the lamp and the rope disappear.. More troubling still are some of the logical leaps that the game makes, as if the plot were not throughly worked out.

It looks like there are multiple endings; I finished the game with a score of 88 out of 100, but I'm uncertain what else I could have done. The ending that I did achieve was again, split-personality. It proved to be initially interesting (why did the former victim behave the way he did?) but panned out to be cheesy and unsatisfying. The PC flavor and the humor closed the game with a wink and a nod, not a roundhouse to the solar plexus.

Divis Mortis is not a suffocating overcoat of gothic dread, despite the name; it is a partly serious survival zombie game. All horror fans should give it a whirl, but the hardcore aficionados will most likely be disappointed by its nonserious bent.

I've played this game -- or attempted to play it -- twice, and the last time around I was up to 160 turns without a single point. Usually if I reach 100 turns with no points (assuming there are points), that's my signal to quit in frustration. I stuck around for a few more turns to see if I had missed something. Consulting the walkthrough shows that indeed, I had missed something. It turns out that in the fourth scene, everything hinges upon one completely non-obvious command. If you intuit it, then apparently the rest of the game opens up into wherever it goes; if you don't, then you're left to scratch your head.

Now with that out of the way, I think you'll probably be scratching your head the majority of this game. It's not that the character's weird outlook prevents you from discovering things; it's not even that what he experiences makes no sense; it's that the game is not well clued or well paced.

Episode... is split into scenes, which are roughly equivalent to chapters, as this is more of a story than a game. That aside, it seems silly to have a score, but nevertheless, there's a score. You can make it to the fourth scene with zero points by doing what you expect the story wants of you. Shouldn't there have been some points along to way to tell you, "Yes, you're doing things right"? I think only the dedicated or the bored will keep trundling on when there's no rewards in sight, be it score or otherwise. The lack of reward lies in the nature of the game, as well. You can progress from scene to scene without any idea that you've done anything great or ill; so there's this sense of being disconnected from what you're doing. Perhaps that is purposeful, given the character's disconnected outlook from his own life.

Anyhow, I can't say that this game really hit me one way or the other. It seemed to just settle into me with a leaden emptiness, like some generic early grunge song. The main character is a mindless happy sort; the world around him is by turns bizarre and mundane; nothing you do or say seems to matter much. I guess it's not horrible, but mystery meat rarely reaches the heights of culinary praise, and Episode...is probably best described as mystery meat.

For a game coded in three hours and revised once, the Forest House holds up darn well. There are still problems, grammar and otherwise, but the game can be won, although winning herein is an uncertain victory at best.

The game is told through the eyes of a 12-year old child, with humorous insights and believable language. The setting is faintly atmospheric, although the author could have really gone for broke and I wouldn't have minded. The concept of a house that only you can see, which has intrigued you for a long time, and which begs you to sneak out in the middle of the night -- that simply screams for immersive language. However, authorial restraint doesn't cripple the game; it just makes it emotionally uniform, except for the very end.

The puzzles herein are refreshingly easy, although some of them are not terribly well clued. They all make sense and you can go back to get objects that you need should you forget them. In all of this, the ADRIFT parser doesn't get in your way, which was refreshing.

The Forest House doesn't take much time, so if you're in the mood for something faintly interesting with a touch of atmosphere, it's a decent play.

Sadly, Wes Garden's Halting Nightmare demonstrates the low quality that ADRIFT games are known for. I didn't start out thinking that; I was convinced of that as the game progressed.

To be sure, it starts out interestingly enough, but half-way through the introduction, at the juncture between grandeur and mundanity, WGHN takes the tried and true path into the lands of everyday horror. The main character is a stock and unreal cypher (really, a teenaged male is not affected by a stunningly attractive female doctor?), and then the game requires the use of adverbs to play. Uggghhhhh. Examine isn't enough; no, you must CLOSELY EXAMINE. Then the grammar goes south and you become aware of the overuse and misuse of ellipses. It feels like the game is self-destructing before your very eyes.

Next, the plot takes a pagan turn and your task suddenly becomes a mission to reunite Grecian deities (apparently they don't have the power to find one another, despite being gods). Right around here, you become aware of the plot-on-rails nature of the game.

The game trudges on, introducing you to a nearly pornographic candy striper named Hope -- with stereotypical Southern charms. (Yes, Southern women are hawt, but can't you be a little bit more creative in communicating their appeal?). To move the plot forward, you get to play "guess the question".

Then, everything hits the fan. It turns out that the only way to play this game is to play it under Windows, because the SCARE clones don't implement combat and guess what this game has? Yup, combat. Even using Wine won't help -- at least it didn't help me.

From what I could see, WGHN ended up feeling like a Buffy episode. In fact, that's probably the best way to describe the game; as Buffy was goth light with stereotyped characters, that's what WGHN is.

Amissville II is simply disastrous. The coding skills here are awful, and the mangled English middle-school level at best. Those are harsh words, I admit, so let's provide evidence for them.

As far as coding goes, there are knapsacks which you can't open (but which magically open once you pick them up), a radio that you start off holding but you can't use, and characters that talk to you, but whom you can't talk to. Who you are is never revealed, because examining yourself returns no useful information whatsoever. Examining the newspaper reveals a graphic of a newspaper that the author didn't even finish creating. You get the idea.

The text omits apostrophes, features weird spacing, uses a strange character for the letter "Y", forgets verbs, misspells words, omits periods, and graces the screen with run-on sentences. Note: these are not occasional issues. They occur in every single room. Of course, there's profanity as well.

The feel is some drugged mix of environmentalism, down home humor, and general geekiness, strung together with attempts at Romanticism that result in an extremely amateurish pastiche. The fact that the game is massive doesn't really help, although that might appeal to players who like exploring. Don't get me wrong; Amissville II has a distinctive feel. The author succeeded there. However, distinction without quality is infamy, and Amissville II is infamous.

You can detect a certain enthusiastic earnestness in this game, like that of the late Paul Panks. I don't want to trod unnecessarily upon the author, but the craft of the game was almost nonexistent. Amissville II has the look and feel of a game that was coded in a week, start-to-finish, if not in a shorter period of time. I played it hoping that it was some marginal improvement over what I'd read of Amissville, but if this is an improvement, then I shudder. That's what evinces my stinging words -- the fact that the author just didn't care.

If you've been running low on anti-American paganistic stories, Sons of the Cherry will recharge your battery. Of course, SOTC features the expected "people born more than 100 years ago are irrational and stupid" sub-theme as well as potshots at Christianity. At least the author knows his audience. I'm a bit mystified as to why he felt it necessary to disguise this in a generic CYOA RPG outfit, though. Those clothes are especially deceptive because they make it seem like you have choices, when in reality, your choices are all illusions.

The plot is on rails -- no matter what you choose, you end up at the same place. Maybe you can die, but I tried a few things and nothing resulted in my death. SOTC is much more of a story than a game, but you still have to select some meaningless choice, and click a button for the plot to proceed. I'm no fan of non-interactive fiction, and SOTC is non-interactive fiction.

The prose style is fairly atmospheric, competent (errors are few), and concise. The game is unscored, and I didn't notice anything that affected your statistics, though you'd think that it would. Maybe you have to finish the game or go much further than I did. I quit early on, after learning that my character was a warlock of some sort.

If you enjoy non-interactive fiction disguised, pro-witchcraft themes with a dose of anti-Americanism, you'll like SOTC.

On the quality of the writing alone, East Grove Hills ranks as stellar. The characters are well-defined, believable, true-to-life, and pitiable, even though the main character (narrator) can be hurtfully sarcastic. The feel is high-school angst captured to a T, without being preachy, ridiculous, or done to excess. You can feel it soaking into your pores, if you've forgotten what it's like, or radiating out of them when the words find their brothers beneath your skin.

However, it's not a game. It's not even a CYOA. The plot has an inescapable chokehold upon the player, and all you can do is go from one scene to the next, as expected. Despite that this is hinted to be part of the narrator's character, it doesn't help alleviate the claustrophobia it induces in the player.

There are some technical problems, too, especially when conversation topics carry over from one scene to the next. I almost felt embarrassed for the author when I discovered that.

The real disappointment of East Grove Hills lies in the possibilities it excludes. Though the main character survives two frightening scenes, nowhere in his mind is a thought of fighting back. Isn't it time that we recognized that madmen intentionally target areas full of helpless people? Just for once, I'd like to see a game that instead of celebrating weakness, panic, or terror in such a situation, turned the tables. East Grove Hills regurgitates the same, stale, familiar theme as though everyone were helpless, instead of individuals possessed of the need to survive and defend their friends.

Worse, no-one seems to learn anything from their experiences. The ending -- if that was its purpose -- ignores the fact that it takes seriously messed-up people to do the things the game mentions; merely being an outcast isn't enough. We're talking years of parental neglect and near-abandonment, in the case of Columbine. Other cases involved use of anti-depressants which can have horrible reverse effects upon teenagers, because they are still physically maturing. As a result, the ending is lackluster.

East Grove Hills is worth playing, if just for the writing quality alone.

This is a one-room experiment in humor or zombie realism, or both. The ending is humorous; the beginning is gross; there's not much between besides the initial groping around figuring out what you are and what you're supposed to eat.

For a game coded in one hour, the prose is surprisingly problem-free. The introduction effectively sets the scene and gets you right into the action, what little there is. There is gore and your initial meal is a bit stomach-churning.

It might be a bit unfair to give this game one star, but it's so limited in what it does, two stars seems madly generous. To be sure, it's a better game than any game in which you "mount car", but to make a bad pun, there's just not enough meat here.

The Sisters begins a little better than your standard horror story; at least you are given a reason for getting to the old mansion. Could the author have made it more atmospheric? Yes. Could the author have cared about grammar, punctuation, and all those fundamentals? You betcha. The overuse of ellipses to end sentences (for maximum spook value, I assume) is particularly grating. Anyhow, the game begins fairly well and does draw you in.

There are some technical problems that can kill you, so be warned. The first of these is a lack of synonyms for a common verb problem -- annoying. (Spoiler - click to show)The next one requires you to close the penknife. This is not optional. If you drop the penknife, even in another room, you will still die if you try to go down the steep decline! The lack of synonyms for common verbs leads straight into guess-the-verb-land for some of the puzzles (none of which are crucial to the plot, fortunately). The Sisters loses points for technical problems that really should have been fixed.

The prose is decent; it's not campy, it's not bad, it's just unfocused. Take this as an example: "You slowly wake, somewhat reluctantly." Occasionally there are little bits of prose satisfaction, such as "...you have a nagging feeling that waking will only complicate things." Jokes are rarer still. The scenes that build the sense of unease are decent; the atmospherics are unoriginal.

The plot is a little bit better than the usual, but it doesn't have the originality (except the end) to make it truly memorable. It does allow you to explore quite a bit and yet provides enough plot to keep you playing. That's worth praising. I have played better-implemented games that couldn't keep my interest alive.

The scoring system feels pinball-esque, in that you're racking up a point here, three points here, and so on. I'm not an enemy of points, but in this game, they seriously disrupted the sense of immersion.

The ending ambushes you and before you have typed more than a few times, the game is over. I'm not sure that winning is possible, and neither am I sure what role score plays here. Would I have achieved a more positive result had I score seventy instead of fifty?

As other reviewers have noted, this is not a Lovecraftian opus; my hat's off to the author for at least trying to be original, even if he did not completely succeed. Altogether, The Sisters is a somewhat interesting game that rewards you with a chilling finale`.

Mite is an easy-going, picturesque, coming-of-age sort of fantasy anchored in the section of the literary landscape inhabited by The Wind in the Willows. By the way, you're a pixy. The writing here is nearly flawless and engrossing; never once does mimesis break. After a moment or two, only bodily functions will remind you that you aren't actually trodding beneath the caps of mushrooms or interacting with fey creatures.

The plot may not be original, but it is handled deftly and with authenticity. You are Mite, a young pixy lad who has discovered an egg that belongs to the Prince. Your job -- and your parents insist that you accept it -- is to return the egg. You've never been far from home, but this is your chance to learn about the world and take on the challenges of adulthood.

The puzzles in Mite range from simple to almost nettlesome, but none of them are cruel or overly difficult. The only fault I find with them, in general, is that sometimes the solutions lie in rooms you have yet to explore. The map itself is often linear, and so I was concerned that by going ahead a few rooms would result in losing the game. Besides that, they rank as some of the most true-to-the-game, immersive, organic, and satisfying puzzles in the history of IF.

Unfortunately, Mite does have a few typos and grammar problems that prevent it from being a five-star game. None of these make the game unwinnable or foul up your ability to solve any puzzles. They are just unexpected defects, like the cup holder in your new car coming loose as you round a bend. Also, the conversation system is the primitive ask/tell. Conversational purists will probably dislike Mite for that alone, but fortunately, the game manages to soften the impact of those restrictions.

Mite is not too easy, and not too hard. It is packed with memorable encounters and leads to a satisfying conclusion. It touches on various enduring themes, and does so with grace, class, and innate nobility. In short, Mite is a class act from start to finish. Brava, Sara Dee.

The intro and the first few rooms of this game are amazing, as it describes a world that exists only as hateful fantasy. "No rhyme or reason"? Uhm, that doesn't make sense. No-one bothers to go to the effort to track, arrest, and imprison someone on a whim; every action has a reason.

Curiously, the author reveals virtually nothing about the main character. That arouses natural sympathy in the player's breast, but I find it disingenuous and cowardly. The backdrop is the war on terror; the character begins by escaping a cell; and the prison is apparently a "rendition" facility (no, the character is not Pvt Manning). The main character is most likely a jihadist Muslim. So the odds are on whatever he was doing having something to do with murdering a lot of people.

"How will they know that you're telling the truth?" If the implication holds, the author demonstrates shocking ignorance of "taqqiya" -- the deception of your enemy if it preserves your life or advances the cause of Islam. This is a common tool in the jihadist toolbox.

"Low value" does not mean "not part of anything," as the author suggests, revealing her ignorance of intel. "Low value" means "not likely to yield actionable evidence". Beyond that, the game offers up another unrealistic scenario: the government knew they couldn't get anything from the prisoner, but kept him anyways? That simply wouldn't be done -- unless you're inclined to believe the stories told by taqqiya-mouthing jihadists. By this point, I'm laughing. Really, how can you make a game where you know nothing about the world you're trying to model?

The information that you find about the procedures apparently is so controversial that it will prove your innocence. And this information is about...wait for it...the PrOcEdUrEs. Hurry, someone call the ACLU. They'll get right on those panties on your head and other forms of psychological fake-out marketed as "torture"!

For further evidence that the main character is a jihadist -- or possibly, an anarchist, try examining the corpses; both place the same low value upon human life. Here Out of the Pit edges up to eliminationist rhetoric.

As you keep going, you find misspellings and the usual purple prose (consider the laptop and its pieces). There is no challenge from a puzzle perspective, either. The single puzzle is painfully easy to solve, and escaping the prison is also mindless, requiring just the ability to type compass directions.

For a game that presumes to be deadly serious, Out of the Pit fails catastrophically. It's political kabuki theatre.

This game consists of an entirely nondescript one-room plane that you are in -- not a seat or stewardess to be seen -- and an annoying sister who repeats the same thing every turn. For some inexplicable reason you have a survival kit in your purse. No verbs do anything except wait. So you wait and wait and wait until you get tired of waiting and then you quit.

If this game is actually an interactive life experience, maybe we are all on planes, stuck in a game with a title that means nothing, surrounded by annoying people that we want to shut up but can't -- ok, I give up. This game has no meaning and no satisfaction. At least Pick Up the Phone Booth and Die was funny.

From the first paragraph, you know this game will be bad. Scary Caps, grammar problems, and point of view problems scream off the screen. The content? Well, it fits.

The game channels the spirit of low-grade slasher/gore films, and the setup is strictly by the numbers: teens meet in an out of the way place to drink and have sex. Monster shows up. Dead bodies ensue. Sure, the girls have mildly humorous names, but that's it for camp -- besides the hackneyed plot.

Technical problems abound. You can't actually converse with anyone (getting no response from attractive women would be realistic, but not from your friends); you can drink an endless amount of beer and never get drunk or have to pee; you can't drive your own car.

Advancing the plot means a lot of waiting. It's like watching one of those lame movies and having to hit the play button every few moments. Ugh. Also, the number of profanities is off the charts. Double ugh.

I agree with RandomExile's comments about the plot being on rails, although that may be too gracious. The plot is in a straitjacket. Maybe that was the point, so that you could role-play one of those imbeciles who sits around and waits to be carved up by the monster. This is especially frustrating in one of the character's death scenes, where you just sit by and watch. This might be fiction, but it's sure not interactive.

Hallow Eve is nasty, boring, not funny, and not self-aware. In short, it's just like a Friday the 13th film -- best off avoided.

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.

It's true that this game is spartan and that default responses will greet most of your actions, but as I've played some truly bad games lately, I find the whisper of a plot and the lack of dying in six turns refreshing.

Housekey, Part I features three rooms of minimal implementation. Most items can be examined (the table, the bed, the rubbish), and the plot is linear and hand-holding. If you follow the game's clues, you can get the house key and get out in less than ten turns. The ending is quite the cliffhanger, which makes you wonder why there was no part 2. Part 2 was definitely planned, so what happened?

That said, there are some oddities. First, the title. At least in American English, house key is two words. The note is (Spoiler - click to show)in some language that I didn't recognize (German? Swiss?). The score and turn counters are combined, which is initially deceptive.

Is it worth playing? There's not enough there to justify the effort, but it's not bad.

I don't care much for games conducted in limited spaces; they almost always make me feel claustrophobic. There are exceptions to the rule -- Marika the Offering, for example, was masterful; Pick up the Phone Booth and Die was humorous; and there are others, but Dog/House is not one of them.

Here, there are two rooms, and only two rooms. That's limiting enough, but the sense of claustrophobia increases with the rejection messages that meet nearly every action. You can't go anywhere except outside, and you can't do anything with the principal items in the rooms. There is a help command, but it doesn't help much.

What you're supposed to do is left unclear; it seems that the game changed quite a bit from version 1 to 2. However, Dog/House does feature some interesting items (the autumn leaves) and some sharp writing that gives you a taste of atmosphere. If the author had developed the game more, it would have been truly engrossing.

The End & etc shows that the author has progressed a bit from the See Spot Run, "Mount car" level. The setup is familiar: an alien invasion, and of course, time is not on your side. You have seven turns to figure out what to do.

The End & etc gives us an intro, motivation, a plot, and a puzzle that makes you think a second or two. I couldn't win, but I did only try a handful of times. Unfortunately, the usual problems abound: no descriptions, a typo, Scary Caps, death in under 10 turns, and read-the-author's-mind-itis. A few beta-testers would have really helped here.

I salute the author for a much better outing than his previous efforts.

After reading the intro, I really have to wonder if the author has some sort of self-hate issues going on. Why release a game that shows no evidence of purpose or plot, and has no reason for existence? Is this the only way that he can garner attention, by creating worthless games and then plaguing us all with the source code?

The writing style is vague and distinctively careless. Here's an example (and no, this is not atypical): "You are here. You can see That Car there." Behold the masterful use of Scary Caps, as if the car was supremely important. But it, like everything -- literally -- in this game, has no detail, no response to EXAMINE, no reason for existence.

Nothing is ever explained. Why do you die in six turns? Why can you not drive a car, but only mount it? What does it mean to mount a car in the first place? I can only think that the author wrote this game in five minutes, probably while taking a dump. There's certainly zero evidence of beta-testing.

You can win the game; you can lose the game. However, none of the endings have any emotional impact as they are just the default responses. So in the end, you play a game that brings no sense of achievement, no pleasure in winning, no sorrow in losing, a pointless game that exists for no reason.

In a single word, why?

If this game was actually playable, I have no doubt that it would be excellent, if the uneasy and atmospheric writing in the first two rooms was characteristic. Unfortunately, the first two rooms are all you will ever see in this game. You can never return to the chapel once you leave it. "Exit" works, but "enter" does not. No directions lead anywhere. You cannot affect the door; you cannot take the path, and there is nowhere else to go. It's not a matter of time, either, as waiting produces no results. Purple prose is everywhere, so there's nothing you can do with the world around you. I'm surprised by this, more than anything. Was Room 206 even finished?

Ordinarily I would eat up a game with dark humor and savor all the odd and eerie elisions that it gave me, but not so, here. I think the first strike is the main character; simply, she doesn't arouse any sympathy or empathy in my chest. She has several character flaws that work against her -- toilet-mouth, sexually loose, rather shallow.

The diary is strike two. If it was well-done, the game could be effective (as a tragedy), but if not, it would mark the long grey march to the end. I was looking forward to a fascinating inner life, one haunted by despair and a clutching for hope, but it came off pedestrian and flat. What the main character has experienced just doesn't seem sufficient to motivate her to commit suicide. The soaring highs, the crashing lows, the sense of oppression from which suicide seems to proffer the only hope -- these are not present. Perhaps that is a backhanded way of demonstrating the needlessness of suicide, but the lack of empathy could just as easily become another brick in the wall. "See? Even people who write games about it don't really understand it!" quoth the overwrought teen.

As for game play, there are very few bugs. The only one I found was where the narrator slipped into first person when second person had been used all along. The game distinguishes sensibly between vague options (such as "turn on water"). You can do most things that you'd expect to be able to. The only exceptions involved water, which is notoriously difficult to deal with, but if you're going to have a tub, I think that you've accepted the challenges of water. To make it purple prose is a cop-out.

The writing style is a bit rough, and it often uses hyphens in the place of semicolons or periods. A bit more polishing is in order.

Finally, the whole razon d'etre of the game is contradictory -- strike three. The help traces the evolution of the game and the author's purpose. After I read that, I thought, "Ok, I can see why he did it." However, not all endings have a postscript as described in the help. Thus, the entire stated reason of the game (to show the effects of suicide) is negated. Was that slapped on to salve the author's conscience? It's a bait-and-switch scenario.

If you're going to make a game like this, it should be better-rounded, simply due to the sensitive subject nature. As it stands, it encourages you to keep playing to see how many different endings you can discover; the different endings of course are different manners in which you attempt suicide. Suicide, despite the author's stated intentions, glorifies suicide.

There is no question about whether this is a game or not -- it's not. It's a one-question effort, with no writing, no joke, nothing but standard responses. Not even its brevity atones for its pointlessness.

I have to admit that I didn't expect much from an adaption of a Stephen King work. The Mist, however, underwhelmed even those expectations.

The writing is over-the-top, cartoonish horror as you might have already expected given the source. A tentacled mist is sucking people out of a store. Ooh, scary! Important words are IN ALL CAPS, and of course you have stabs at Christianity. Yes, there's a crazy old lady and her mindless followers looking for blood. Wow, how original!

The parser's responses are cloying. Typing things it doesn't understand either produces pats on the head, displays a thought from the PC, or speeches from any NPCs around. The effect is disconcerting, as you're not sure if what you see is a response to your actions or the game ignoring your actions. In addition, each turn spits out an annoying set of dashes, as though you wouldn't be able to tell the response from your command without help. Worse, the parser requires you to confirm your responses to opening doors. These responses don't indicate that something awful is going to happen, oh no. They're just there to pat you on the head, yet again.

The NPCs exist just to move from place to place like unchanging pieces on a chessboard. Talking to them rarely produces useful information, and they don't respond to changes in their environment. (Spoiler - click to show)To see what I mean, go into the meat locker and wait for an NPC to show up.

While the parser isn't at all bad, especially given the era of the game, the plot more than makes up for it. You're required to do things that just don't make sense to advance the plot. (Spoiler - click to show)If I just saw a guy get sucked into the mist, what's the most logical thing to do? Follow him? Of course not, but that's what you have to do to get out of the supermarket. And random death awaits you wherever you go. I guess the idea is not to stay in one place too long, or to bother talking to anyone, because if you do, it's game over. Even that technique -- keeping the player on the run -- could have worked, had you a chance to escape once a bug shows up. But you don't, and the concept of being killed by dragonflies, bees, and two-feet-long bugs isn't horrific, just silly. That aside, you'll also need to map (could this game get any more annoying?) but not just because the game is large -- because it's filled with tons of empty rooms. But that's what The Mist is about, apparently: nonsensical actions, empty rooms, and silly deaths.

Finally, saving the game, at least using DOSBox, is not possible. Perhaps you need a better emulator or a DOS machine.

All things considered, The Mist is stunningly awful. It's worth noting that no-one is willing to claim authorship for this game. That makes sense, though. I suppose if I had cobbled together something this poor, I wouldn't want to affix my name (or even a pseudonym) to it either.

Of course, given that most Speed IF entries suck more a black hole, the hurdle for good Speed IF is ridiculously low. All you have to do is finish your game and you're in. You are a Chef not only surmounts that apparently difficult hurdle, but actually succeeds in being enjoyable to play and funny, to boot. The humor here is wild-eyed breathless zaniness. The difficulty is very easy, and the time it takes to win is a few minutes, tops. The ending is nothing spectacular, but the fun is all in the breathless over-the-top style and the running gag. It's definitely worth a few minutes of time. Bravo, Dan Shiovitz.

The name of the game contains much truth; unfortunately, "The Terrible, Old Manse" begins with a grammar error in the title itself and the problems don't let up from there. The room descriptions are littered with typos, some resulting in unintentional comedy (or pornography). Take for example, the Pantry. Guess what's misspelled? The name of the room itself! Even a main object in the game suffers from this bone-headed mistake -- the lantern, or should I say, the LATERN. Yup, you'll have to refer to the LATERN the entire game because TTOM doesn't recognize the word LANTERN.

For additional weariness, objects don't behave the way that you'd expect. (Spoiler - click to show)You can open the arras, for instance, and you open it by going east from the first room. Simply getting the key causes doors to unlock, while dropping it does nothing. What kind of house is this? The NPCs actions' are similarly implemented, particularly in the case of the bat. TTOM states that the bat harries you, but your movement is unrestricted and no additional time is taken up from its interference unless you are waiting. (Spoiler - click to show)Also, the bat can age you just by touching you. Huh? This, however, doesn't prevent you from getting the bat and carrying it around. Finally, the game imposes a severe time limit and a three-item carrying limit.

As for writing style, TTOM drowns in minimalistic descriptions, with room after room of terse "This is" and "There are" sentences. Its atmosphere is MIA with the few standard horror cliches not even raising the game to the level of self-parody. Purple prose is everywhere.

If the game is winnable, it must rely upon examining every object to discover which ones are purple prose and which are not. I gave up long before resorting to that exercise in frustration.

It becomes painfully obvious that this game wasn't tested by anyone besides the author, and I seriously wonder if the author himself bothered to test his own game. Didn't even a simple comparison with any other IF game tell the author that something was off?

The Terrible Old Manse is fairly terrible, even for a first-time outing.

An Informal Time is as the author himself described it in the game's header; though why someone would want to release such a work is beyond me. Maybe this is a new marketing campaign: lack of testing = surreal! Frankly, AIT gives surrealism a bad name.

That sounds harsh, I realize, but AIT consists of ancient adventure-game cliches and parser infatuation masquerading as profound insight. (Spoiler - click to show)No, being inside the compass is not novel, although it could have been if you could do anything with or in it! It's not surreal, just spartan and old hat.

There's no score, nothing surprising or insightful, but there are bugs. You'll find that items don't work (despite their description and the room description) and that doing common actions will lead you to cryptic error messages, such as the name of this review. However, you will be amazed -- at the paucity of testing that this game received. Why was this game not tested? This is the author's fourth work. What happened?

One star. This "game" is waste of everyone's time -- including the author's.

The Empty Room begins with a contradiction; if the room is empty, how are you in it? Who you are is described in such a way to whet your appetite, but the meal never comes. That, unfortunately, is symbolic of the entire game. Many times TER whets your appetite with interesting descriptions, samples of high-tech (and low-tech), but there's no follow-through. There is no greater resonance.

Instead, what you have is a game that successfully encourages you to keep playing by gradually revealing changes in your environment. It's very linear, but this is one of a few games where the linearity works. Even after having played and won, I'm still not clear on what I just did, so while it's engaging, and challenging, it's not terribly clear. I suspect this is another part of the bare-bones mentality that never bothered with the answering why you are in the room, why you are dressed like that, and all the other big questions that will bother you while you're playing.

With all that said, the implementation is a bit, shall I say, odd. If there is something on the floor, for instance, the room description will not tell you that. Oh no. You have the examine the floor. The same thing goes with complex objects that you discover. You have to examine sides, walls, ad nauseum. The same thing goes when you do something. The game will not always inform you of the results, so it's back to examining things. This often places you in a somewhat frustrating and tedious cycle of "Do X. Examine Y." Now all of this would absolutely sink this game IF the puzzles were hard. Fortunately they are not, and so you can make progress quickly.

When you do win, the ending itself is probably the greatest let down since winning 1942, or the "endings" of Twin Peaks and The Blair Witch Project. There is a momentary elision of joy, but nothing is explained.

TER deserves three stars, because it can be won, it is challenging without being frustrating, and despite its linearity and its one-room nature (arguably), I played it to the end, and I managed to win.

And yes, the help system? Avoid it if you can.

I remember playing this whenever my family would visit my mom's friend, way, way back in the day (yes, that's two "ways", so you know this was just a few years after dinosaurs ruled the earth). I never associated this with Scott Adams, so I was really surprised when I redownloaded it recently, wondering if This Game was That Game. Why didn't Scott Adams come to mind, you might be wondering? Adventureland left an awful taste in my mouth with its tons of ways to die and epic death phrases such as "Bees sting you." Pirate Adventure, however, was much more fair, and had atmosphere, something I appreciated at a visceral level even back then. The puzzles ranged from easy to challenging, but none of them were frustrating to the point of making me want to bash my head in. I also appreciated the major goal of the game: building a ship. It wasn't something I knew a whole lot about, and there were some leaps of logic required, but the novelty factor helped quite a bit. I'm sure if I grew up in the shipyard I would have been howling about the lack of realism.

Now with all that said, the parser is still primitive. There's still the lack of helpful responses more often than not. However, because the game is paced well, with puzzles usually ramping up in difficulty as the game progresses, you're left with feeling a sense of achievement. In contrast, Adventureland was more like running around into a series of dead ends. PA is also linear, so here's fair warning if you dislike that in games. (Usually I detest that, so there's something to be said for this game in that alone.)

All in all, PA is one of Scott Adam's best, and if you're willing to put up with the neolithic-age parser for ten minutes, you just might end up playing the game for much longer.

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.

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!

Although the Z-Files review nails the essence of the game, there's a few other aspects worth commenting upon.

Bloodline is probably the best use of the one-room game setup besides Marika the Offering. All of time telescopes to a single handful of fragmented seconds as you play a game with a guy you adore. It's not nearly that Romantic, of course.

The game is wildly inconsistent about the objectives of the main character. Is it to have a first kiss, or to get laid? Yes, 13-year olds totally like "going all the way" does happen, but that doesn't mean it's pleasant to participate in such a game. This is one of those situations where it'd be nice to know before playing what was in the game. (The game does not mention the main character's concerns about fitting in, although that could be a possible -- albeit poorly-worded -- conclusion that would also fight against her other comment.)

Outside of the profanity and the implications of sex, Bloodline captures the feeling of a slumber party well: the cliquishness, and the sudden emotional changes, particularly.

Finally, the pacing is lackluster, as the game really consists of only four turns at the end; everything else is simply waiting for your turn and additional cluing.

The Couch of Doom explores one of those humorous and almost painfully realistic scenarios -- motivating yourself to face the world (in this case, by getting up off of a couch) when you really don't want to. Sounds fun, right? Unfortunately, the fun in this case is mostly window dressing.

The small things first. Some verbs just don't do anything (like READ INVITATION). Some verbs that you'd expect to be there aren't (like PET SHAYS). Purple prose abounds, which is more annoying than usual given that this is a one-room game. It's even more annoying that the game mentions a computer many times, yet it's not accessible, which knocks the realism factor down quite a bit.

All those aren't fatal flaws, though. However, Couch also doesn't tell you when your mood changes, and if mood is roughly equivalent to points (or at least progress), it's important that the player realize the effects of his actions. What if I had done something to knock my status down and didn't realize it? It's unfair to not tell the player about important changes to his world. Yes, I used a masculine pronoun back there, and that's because the sex of the main character is never mentioned directly. You can discover it by interacting with one object, but that's not the point. Games shouldn't hide important information from players!

I might have been able to slog on to the end, but the final and dooming problem was that the game was dreadfully missing clues. The entirety of Couch consists of trying things at random until you find something that makes you feel better; that this could be argued as realistic doesn't mean that it makes for an enjoyable game. Besides, even the most dispirited have an internal dialog that gives them some clue what would lighten their mood. That's wholly absent in Couch.

I understand that the deadline for the Jay Is Games contest was aggressive and that many games didn't have the luxury of beta-testing. That's why the little things aren't the problem here, but the fundamental design issues are. If you have only so much time, then make sure that the design is solid first. The Couch of Doom, at least in its current state, would best be appreciated by puzzle-solvers with patience.

Yes, this is yet another Lovecraft IF horror, so you know what to expect: sea creatures, 1800's-esque mansions, the occult, and of course, nonsensical gibberish that's supposed to be ultra-scary, or something. I'm no fan of these boring horror tropes, but "Manor" sucks you in without presenting itself as Lovecraftian initially. Therefore, I have to give it backhand kudos for pacing.

However, pacing alone doesn't redeem the game. Spelling errors, underimplementation, lack of clueing, and guess-the-verb abound. Perhaps the game can be finished, but its unfinished nature will trip up many players long before they reach the end (or quit upon discovering its Lovecraftian nature). The descriptions it does feature are sparse, barely-there wisps of words, almost placeholders. The only thing that saves the game from one-star land are a few original scenes that crop up about mid-way through. (Spoiler - click to show)Particularly, when you read the journal in the office, and once you talk to your uncle. The latter I'd even go so far to describe as inspired.

Another good point that I must begrudgingly concede: the puzzles are not difficult. They don't get in the way of the story and they don't feel artificial when they do occur; some may complain that they are too easy, but I'd rather have it that way than the reverse.

All in all, Manor is a semi-interesting game, and probably a cult classic if you love yourself some Lovecraft. The game isn't finished, but I do hope that the author fixes it up, because it'd be a shame to let the few good scenes go to waste.

This is one of those games where you have to play over and over again in order to find the secret combination that allows you to win. The problem with this game -- as with all games of this sort -- is that emotion is crushed by the bus of monotony. You need prose that really hits home in order to motivate players to replay a game repeatedly, and Grief doesn't come close to such prose.

I played the game through once, and while I was surprised by the ending, I wasn't motivated to play it again -- nor did I have much hope that victory was achievable, given the name of the game. I suppose that's another way to play this game: just once, lose, and then reflect upon the nature of grief. However, even that method of playing is unsatisfactory, due to the just-the-facts-m'am style of prose. So what does Grief achieve? It manages to be decently coded, threadbare, and unmotivating.

Upon reading the introduction, I was thoroughly baffled. First, if you represent 3-D objects by common 2-D representations (a circle for a sphere, for instance), how is that new? Why create a whole new term to sum up common painting techniques? Second, I was baffled by how a painting style could express itself in words. Playing the two games only confirmed my generally dismal impression of abstract art, especially abstract art as interactive fiction (fiction presumes a narrative, after all). In any case, the two works, Black and White, purport to represent two extremes: no freedom and unlimited freedom.

White places you in a world that you have created and gets away with generic descriptions by claiming that you have made these things, so there's no need to describe them in detail. However, White has bugs. Typos abound and the room title never matches the status line. The interaction consists of an ELIZA (artificial psychologist) approach that is somewhat less interactive than that AI experiment. Here, the narrator comments in glowing terms on everything you do, but nothing you do has any effect. This is unlimited freedom in an abstract and ultimately purposeless way.

Supposedly Black represents the other extreme -- an utter lack of freedom; however, White didn't represent freedom in any meaningful sense, and Black doesn't represent lack of freedom in any meaningful sense. The opposite of freedom in IF would be a static story, but Black presents no story, only a one-room exercise in frustration. (Spoiler - click to show)Every single command generates the same response, except for one. After typing in "QUIT", Black responded, "There is no way out of this darkness." "Yes there is," I said, and quit the interpreter.

Philosophical struggles can fuel great prose and make for engaging interactive fiction, but "Suprematism in IF" completely forgot about the "fiction" aspect of IF. Neither Black nor White addresses the fundamental nature of story; both focus strictly on puzzles, and as a result, come off as cheap, cynical, and ultimately, unsatisfying philosophical experiments.

Neither experiment delivers anything original as far as philosophy goes, either, serving up only the reheated dish of nihilism. Saying that there is no hope in either freedom or lack of freedom, both are chains, both are prisons -- that itself is a false equivalence; many, many people have given their tears, their sweat, and their blood to be free. They were not satisfied by such simplistic equivalences, and neither was I satisfied by "Suprematism in IF".

Glowgrass presents a future that is shrived of emotion and a time where natural resources are nearly depleted. This perspective is unavoidable, due to every room and every object being described in the same mathematical manner with salient environmental preachments. This approach made the game not very enjoyable, but I was able to muddle through until the bugs and the under-implementation hit.

Trying to (Spoiler - click to show)plug things in or connect them is a well-known problem with this game (see prior reviews). If you use the word "connect" by itself, you'll get a loverly TADS error. And if you type "HINTS", guess what? There aren't any! However, the ABOUT tells you that this game is not a puzzle-fest, but a story. That's cold comfort when you're left wondering what to do with the objects that you can't fit together in any way.

There are a few interesting moments that I was able to discover, but they don't make up for the dispiriting and frustrating whole.

This is probably the shortest IF game in existence. It has fewer options than Aisle; it takes less time than other one-turn games like Pick Up the Phone Booth and Die. Unfortunately, it doesn't compensate the player for either of these two restrictions. The writing, while satirizing well-known IF games and H.P. Lovecraft, does so in an over-the-top pulp style that's old hat. The endings seem tacked on and gauche; the most interesting thing is the whole setup, and as a result, the game is barely worth playing.

Some will complain that this game is not valid IF, but others have said the same thing about other one-turn joke games as well. You do have an option (singular) which gives you interactivity, although a very small amount of it. Magic Travels is best enjoyed as a satire about IF and common IF themes. It's not especially thoughtful satire, but what were you expecting? On the plus side, even if you hate it, it's very short.

This is another game where I must be immune to the charm, as Muse didn't strike me as either particularly emotional or Victorian. Although bugs threatened mimesis (you can carry around your trunk even though the game tells you it's too heavy, you can talk to the minister without introducing yourself), it was the lack of direction that really confused me.

There are no points that I could discover, and I had no idea whether what I said was leading anywhere or whether it was more idle conversation. Muse doesn't clue in the player when the PC makes progress and the PC doesn't often think about his conversations; it's very frustrating and left me just guessing topics and trying them out with every NPC.

The story cries out for a immersive world (say that you and the painter get angry; why can't you buy him an ale?), but instead it's bare-bones implementation time. I'm sure that there are certain paths that you should take, but I'm left mystified as to what they are.

I guess I could fight my way through to some ending, but I've got better things to do than spend an hour or more guessing the conversation topic. Muse aims high (Victorian romance) and sadly, falls short.

Marika the Offering presents a situation where every moment counts, and unlike most IF games that strive to achieve this with multiple exclamation points, Marika does this through a believable plot, a creative setting, and sharp characterization. The back story can be read by typing "STORY" instead of dumping the information on the player; while it is useful reading and it adds to the atmosphere, the back story is simply too long-winded and in need of a good edit.

The setting is the inside of a tower, although your goal is not to escape, but to prevent the Count from entering. It's a refreshing twist on the customary one-room theme that hasn't been equalled (or even attempted) since. As you might expect, the atmosphere is one of gothic desperation, which proved quite enjoyable.

The gameplay is where Marika unravels, unfortunately. Initial descriptions of items are useful, but succeeding descriptions are threadbare. Most puzzles are hinted well, but a critical puzzle is not, and furthermore, its solution is not at all obvious. Yet it's apparent that the author spent time on the gameplay, given the clever use of Marika's situation to govern her responses to unknown words and the utility of the death scenes.

On the whole, Marika is an enjoyable although frustrating game. The lack of clueing for an important puzzle, the lack of descriptions, and the threadbare responses all drag down what could have been an excellent effort, leaving it stranded as simply good and promising. Marika is one of the few games that cries out for the author to give the game one last go, not only for the sake of tantilizingly-close excellence, but also, because you've come to care about the well-sketched character.

POTA2 has many compelling elements -- a creepy atmosphere, a believable plot, a snarky narrator, and a dash of humor; however it also features features missing punctuation, erroneous game messages, profanity, a bare-bones implementation, and a throw-away ending. The result is a playable, moderately enjoyable game that fizzles out at the end.

As far as the atmosphere goes, horror often needs moments that release tension so that it doesn't become unbearable; POTA2 provides those points in just the right amounts (for example, note the name of the Ferris wheel contrasted with the rest of its description). The plot is basic, but functional and believable, but the main puzzle is thrown off-kilter by the uneven scoring system. I thought that the game was much larger than it turned out being due to that alone; a third or more of the points result from one action at the very end of the game. And speaking of that action, a false message leads you to believe that there's another item you have to find, when that is not the case.

The implementation's bare-boned nature also misleads you into thinking that there are more tasks to complete; in an absence of guidance, you're left to experiment endlessly with no clue as to whether you're on the right path or not. This encourages you to waste time on red herrings and not use certain items for their intended purposes. Even those intended purposes are not obvious because they are, in at least one instance, a stretch.

The ending came as a complete surprise, and an unwelcome surprise at that. Apparently winning involves making a certain choice at the beginning of the game in an area which you cannot get back to in order to do something that is wholly unethical -- in short, something which I would never have thought to do, and which would be out of character for the PC.

On the whole, POTA2 initially tastes good, but leaves you with a bad aftertaste, much like a diet soda on a hot day.

Yes, this is the first work of a newbie, and it shows. It's extremely rough around the edges and really could use a lot more detail and backstory. Then again, Vigilante doesn't aspire to be anything of import. If you're expecting Photopia or The Moonlit Tower, here, well, why would you?

The game is complete and winnable, which beats all the IntroComp games and nearly all SpeedIF games; so when you look at it from that perspective, you can at least enjoy it. Playing time is less than two minutes, and the plot consists of simply shooting everyone who stands in your way. Seen from the perspective of the "world is against me" typical to vigilante movies, there's some catharsis in wiping out your foes.

Anyhow, I can't really say that this game deserves more than one star, but I would like to encourage the author to give it another shot (pun intended).

As a cave crawl, Spelunker's Quest is rather typical for the genre, although in this case, more is definitely less. The charm of Adventure was its lack of specificity. Because you never knew exactly why you began outside the building, you were free to create your own backstory. Spelunker's Quest (SQ) however, provides you with a plausible backstory, and then fails to use it; it exists simply as a vehicle to get you to the initial room.

The gameplay itself is typical for the genre; there are monsters which mean multiple opportunities for sudden death. The objectives -- getting treasures and getting out -- also break no new ground, except that they're less plausible than usual. Why is that? The backstory gives you a reason to escape, but not a reason to collect treasure. The puzzles themselves aren't terribly difficult, except for two; one involves random violence for no particular reason, and another you'll probably discover through just plain dumb luck. These two puzzles cause the playability to suffer a notch or two.

SQ provides fairly evocative room descriptions, decent descriptions of objects, and doesn't bother with implementing much else. This approach can leave you playing the "get all" game to see what objects are available. Stylistically, you'll find single-line responses with exclamation points and droll replies, again evoking the early cave crawl games. However, the objects and their uses betray that spirit. SQ features both modern and ancient weapons, both technology and magic, without any real thought behind how all of these work together -- it's like the items are present just to solve puzzles.

Finally, while SQ can be solved in thirty minutes or less, you're left with a feeling of incompleteness all the same. How exactly did such a strange world exist in the first place, cobbling together elements from many different times and places? Would your friends believe you when you told them? Isn't there, or shouldn't there be, more? As for a little bit of fun, SQ suffices, but it leaves you with a bland kind of fun, like eating aged cereal.

A Walk in the Park is not only a short game, it's a one-turn game, which makes it positively microscopic. Not only that, but winning is trivially easy. The replay value consists solely of finding other ways to win, which isn't as satisfying as failing to win multiple times and then finally succeeding.

At any rate, the writing style is a silly kind of easy-going pop-culture slice-of-life humor. There are no outright bugs, but then again, the game doesn't promise a whole lot, either. Only a few objects are described and default responses rule the day. That there are no points makes me wonder if the game is finished -- did the author really mean for you to win with zero out of zero points?

At least "A Walk..." isn't annoying. If you need something to do for five minutes, there are definitely worse ways to spend your time.

Sea Captains is faintly interesting, but ends up crippled by a lack of implementation. Purple prose is everywhere. The first (and only?) puzzle is guess-the-verb time, and weirdly enough, the protagonist changes without informing the player. You'll probably wander around for a few turns before you realize what has happened. So if you like a little bit of British slice-of-life to flavor your frustration, Sea Captains is for you.

This game begins with an abundance of purple prose and/or spartan implementation. You are lying down, but you can't get up. You have a basket (which contains things) yet you can't open it. You can't move in any directions, so you're left to just try things at random until something happens. That's annoying. If there are preferred courses of action, it's the designer's responsibility to guide players towards them -- unless ticking off the player is the point, and this game isn't purposefully one of Those Games.

I eventually gave up trying to guess what I was supposed to do next, because the game just didn't have enough hooks to keep me interested. It was missing foreshadowing, clues, plot, and had very little emotion. I realize that sounds harsh, but it's more a statement said with a sigh than a landscape-wasting nuke. Maybe taking a look at how stories work and why they work will help for the next effort.

Yes this game has bugs -- even in the final version. Yes, it does have unnecessary profanity. It's flawed, but it's also a lot of fun, and hilariously, dementedly earnest. Where else are you rewarded for stealing stuff and beating up teenagers, among other things? I couldn't rate it highly because of the bugs, but the perspective alone makes it worth playing.

As others have noted, the writing is top-notch and places the player in a believable penumbra of the Zorkian universe. The over-the-top humor is also well done. The first glaring problem, however, is that the PC's actions and restrictions just don't make sense. Adventurers are known for trying all sorts of things in order to solve puzzles; it's their nature. Thus, the game fails right from the outset with a PC that is effectively straitjacketed.

The responses are entertaining -- at first, until they become tiresome and opaque. Apparently the puzzles depend upon doing random things until you figure out the secret parts of various objects that allow you to solve them. I say "apparently" because after 100 turns and still not a single point, I gave up in frustration.

Beyond the mindlessly illogical PC, the unclued nature of the puzzles, and the ridiculous catch-all behavior of the troll, there's not much to really set apart Enlightenment as a game. Don't misunderstand -- the writing is excellent, but the game mechanics are not, so as a game, Enlightenment just doesn't deliver the goods. I suppose you could spend an afternoon banging your head against the wall, but why do that? If you need to resort to hints to get even the first point, you might well love this game. Me, I'm not in favor of games that frustrating.

Enlightenment is basically for masochists only.

Aside from a few touches of atmosphere, Lonely Places is remedial horror, with all of horror's worst attributes thrown in: stereotypes, profanities, and gore for the sake of gore. In addition, I'd throw in Lovecraftian, which is one of the most overdone and unconvincing forms of horror. Really, unless you are Lovecraft or Ramsey Clark, you're probably better off doing something else. (And while that's just a personal opinion, I've read A LOT of wannabe Lovecraft fiction, and IF seems to prefer this sub-genre over any other form of horror, sadly.)

With that aside, the game feels incomplete, due to typos, misspellings, many default responses, and a general spartan approach to matters. You are driving in your car in the beginning, but there is no stereo. Later on, actions that probably 90% of people would try are not available. As an added bonus, the game insults you in the end if you do not play as you were supposed to.

While the personality test at the end is creative and unique, that in no way atones for all the other problems that this game possesses. What's really disappointing, though, is that many of these problems could be fixed with a few hours of time, if not much less. If a single word can sum up an impression, the word "abandoned" sums up Lonely Places.

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.

The Woods are Dark begins well, with a splash of Irish color, and also as others have noted, provides a reasonable justification for exploring a haunted house. However, once you are past that and the first handful of room descriptions, all the flaws of a carelessly-coded ADRIFT game come to the fore.

For instance, you generally can't interact with objects once you've achieved whatever you were supposed to do with them, even if they are still referenced in the room description. The default responses to interacting with scenery objects (or objects deemed now unimportant or not yet important) are flat-out denials that the object exists. The two-word parser is chafing, especially in a modern IF game. The atmosphere is better than average, but the puzzles are completely unclued and don't move the plot forward at all; they barely add to the atmosphere.

Even for horror afficianados, The Woods Are Dark doesn't deliver much. Its limitations far outweigh its delivery. Past the intro and the first few rooms, it's all downhill from here.

I swear that I don't understand some IF games, and this is one of them. After fiddling and fiddling with the game, I can't find anything to do. You're chained to some guy and you can't escape. In the end you're back home. What happens in between the two points is really just one long exercise in frustration.

The whole "Spend time talking to someone you hate" thing is not fun AT ALL. (Maybe the female gender loves this sort of thing for reasons I'd rather not psychoanalyze. Someone did add this game to a romance list. Yeah. That in itself is creepier than the entire game.) And it's a one-room game, so your claustrophobia is off the charts, but not in a creepy or terror-inducing way, but in a frustrating way. You might end up quitting the game out of boredom before the end comes, but if you hang around for it, there's nothing spectacular awaiting you. That's the ultimate insult.

The ending itself doesn't even seem that awful, so the entire point of the game is pointless. Not only that, but the big feature of the game -- conversation -- is implemented as standard ask/tell. No, there are no topics. No, there is no "Talk" verb. Argh! And if that wasn't enough, there are profanities included for your discomfort, reminding us that the PC is just as scuzzy as the NPC.

So to sum, there's nowhere to go, no-one to root for, and nothing to do.

Baluthar features horror tinged with science fiction, in a rare example of where elements of the two genres fuse into a cold, grim, dreary concoction. (Yes, that is praise!) It has a rather rich back-story and gives you a flavor of dread with an opening quote from Ecclesiastes (one of the heaviest books in the Bible). With all this said, it doesn't go for the atmospheric or emotional jugular, but rather presents puzzles along the way that -- if they worked -- would support the unfolding of the story nicely. Unfortunately, all progress halts at the door scene. The answer isn't too hard to figure out, but it just doesn't work. It's a shame, really. I was looking forward to seeing how Baluthar turned out.

Did I play the same game as the other reviewers? Reading the reviews and the contrasting their sparkling appreciation to what I experienced makes me seriously question if most of the reviewers are on high-grade antidepressants or terminally too-nice. Shaking off that bit of strangeness, let me say first that I started playing Violet expecting a lot. (Yes, those reviews did bias me towards expecting something off-the-charts good). Reality was a bit lacking in comparison.

First, the narrator (Violet) is wearying. Yes, you can say that she's cute; yes, there is this whole exotic appeal to her, but the endless needling, the superiority, and the martyr complex simply wear you down after a while. She is so overdramatic that it drains your energy. Women like her are why guys collapse into saying "Yes, dear," and try to do whatever their wives want, simply to be left in peace.

With that said, the game itself is strangely unforgiving. To solve the puzzles, you must instinctively disregard what Violet wishes. Furthermore, you often have to (Spoiler - click to show)destroy the very things that celebrate your relationship. I'm not sure what the author intended, but that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It's like I'm being forced to annihilate love.

Worse, the puzzles themselves are poorly clued, and often feature an exceedingly strict parser (for instance: "ear" doesn't work, but "ears" does), or important details that should be present when you examine something, but are missing. I've never used the hints on any game as much as I did with this one. This left me feeling very frustrated. I understand that the puzzles are odd, but if that's the case, then shouldn't near-misses be subtly nudged towards the answer? Instead, they are rewarded with standard responses. Probably the most egregious example of this was (Spoiler - click to show)the whole slingshot ordeal.

The ending felt more like how you feel after reaching dry land after being at sea for a few days: you're filled with relief that it's over. Yet even here, the relief is not admixed; there's a bit of creepy cruelty present as well. I'm definitely unsure that I would go to Australia with Violet if I were the main character.

That's another thing -- the main character is a guy who's apparently rather loose, and the game features quite a bit of sexual innuendo. The fact that it's couched in humor doesn't ameliorate the facts of the situation. In one scene, you're listening to the the PC's ex and another man engage in various unspecified sex actions from behind a door. Yuck.

The game features snappy dialog, a seamless conceit that never once breaks memisis, and an interesting narrator. The execution of the puzzles, however, is unfair and frustrating. There are also a few bugs remaining (for instance, there is no response to throwing the coaster). Taking it all into consideration, Violet isn't fantastic, but it could be improved quite a bit by cluing the puzzles better and by implementing a few more verbs.

Although it is set in an apartment, All Alone is head-and-shoulders above other such room-limited games, because it successfully induces all of the claustrophobia that other games only hint at. Here, claustrophobia, paralysis, and isolation, all spiral together into a cold sweat of undiluted terror. On the analytical side, this is pure stalker-horror with the player as the potential victim. The setup uses the limitations of the setting and even of IF itself to bring the aforementioned emotions into play. It's quite effective, and the emotions are compromised only by the profanity towards the end.

However, there is nothing original about the antagonist, and the PC's inability to fight back is also rather stereotypical. I found it frustrating that she could not use the phone as a weapon or that she had not taken any precautions at all, especially given that there had been multiple murders recently.

Still, it is a well-done example of the stalker-horror genre, and it's worth playing.

The game starts off cutely and then right after that smacks you with a puzzle that defines unfair. It's not clued and there is no way to get anywhere in the game without pulling the good old "examine everything" bit.

Then you have a parser that doesn't know common verbs (like knock), and a lot of purple prose. Seriously, there are very few objects in the four-doored vault area and there's purple prose? Not only that, but there are bugs.

Once you make it past a door, you'll find puzzles that are just as annoying, and perverted NPCS to boot. One of the puzzles is a riddle. Another puzzle (get this) is a mathematical word problem. It was at this point that I gave up. I thought games were supposed to be entertaining.

Building is an atmospheric surreal/horror game with puzzles that are loosely connected together. As far as tone goes, it is darkly romantic through and through. It won't appeal to puzzle fiends, but atmosphere junkies will find it more to their liking. Theme? The nature of the modern workplace, seen through a very cynical and mourning mirror.

There are no bugs that I'm aware of; the game is playable and winnable. The puzzles are fair and not difficult except for one, which is challenging. I designed it that way so as to not disrupt the atmosphere.

It is influenced by Babel, so fair warning would be if you don't care for that style of gameplay, you won't enjoy Building much either.

This game is like a sketch, a very rough one done in charcoal, that shows some hints of what the finished drawing could be. I wish folks would not release unfinished games as you go into a game expecting to be able to DO SOMETHING and find out that you can't. Sigh.

I doubt that this was ever finished. You're standing in the shadows, waiting for two goons to reach you so that you can incapacitate one, but the parser doesn't know any words for attacking. Waiting does nothing, either. It could have been interesting, but it's not finished.