Ratings and Reviews by Dan Fabulich

A very basic game with a simple (Spoiler - click to show)guess-the-verb puzzle, but it has some charm for its size.

If you liked this game, you'd probably also like "Pick up the Phone Booth and Die."

The graphics and music are spooky; and the puzzles are good, though none of them were especially amazing.

This game describes itself as a "limited parser" game, but I think I disagree. "Limited parser" games typically have a very small and explicitly enumerated list of verbs, (often including "use") but this game supports dozens of verbs, most of which are undocumented, and some of which are required to win.

There are so many verbs that at times the game has bugs when you use the wrong verb to do the intended action. (Spoiler - click to show)You have to put the key in the lock; you can't unlock the lock with the key, even though "unlock" is a valid verb. This sort of bug basically never happens in limited-parser games; you'd just "use key on lock" because that's the only verb that could possibly work.

I'm not at all sure that Anchorhead has any "fair" puzzles in Emily Short's sense. https://xyzzyawards.org/?p=386

I played Anchorhead about four-ish years ago, but I gave up on it and used the "Guided Tour" walkthrough linked from IFDB. I never felt like I could trust that I was actually solving a puzzle. For many of the puzzles I "solved" by following the Guided Tour, I never understood the solutions at all.

Even for Anchorhead's relatively accessible puzzles, the vast majority of them only make sense in "adventure-game logic" (e.g. the very first puzzle of the game, (Spoiler - click to show)breaking into the real-estate office), but those puzzles are surrounded by red-herring "you can't solve this yet for no known reason" puzzles, so it's unfair to expect the player to apply adventure-game logic to just that puzzle and not any of the other red-herring puzzles.

Good puzzle solutions need to make sense in hindsight. Why does it make sense to break into the (Spoiler - click to show)real-estate office, and not the (Spoiler - click to show)asylum, or the slaughterhouse, or the church, or whatever? Why can I break in on Day 3 but not on Day 2? It just never makes sense.

I'd give Anchorhead one star, but its prose and story are pretty good. So, do as I did: follow mjhayes' Guided Tour. Don't worry one second over the puzzles. Just enjoy the ride. (Note that the Guided Tour hasn't been updated for the 2018 re-release; you'll have to use the 1998 original release, instead.)

For an easter egg, this is a pretty substantial game. It has dozens of rooms and half a dozen puzzles.

The game uses a restricted verb-only parser. "grab" to pick up objects, "use" to use one of your inventory items. I think this undermines a little bit of the fun of puzzle solving; if you reach a puzzle and you have the right inventory item, you can usually auto-solve the puzzle just by typing "use." If "use" doesn't work, you just have to fully explore all of the rooms, "grab" everything that isn't nailed down, and come back and "use" again.

(It also includes a "why" command that just prints random cute messages.)

The game includes a built-in ASCII map, but I found the map illegible, not least because it's full of symbols that aren't defined in the legend. (It doesn't help at all that the game starts by giving you a partial map, then briefly reveals a full map, and immediately takes it away. What's the point of that?)

For the record, the full legend should include:

(Spoiler - click to show)//, \\, and = means a walkway or bridge.
^ means a skybridge, which connects to another ^
~ means a body of water (impassible)
< means a room containing an elevator going up or down

This is a short but very rich piece, like a dark chocolate lavender ganache. I loved the use of additional documents, which appeared suddenly in contrast to the fading in text.

In the current 1.0 version, the zip includes full source and a Vorple website AND a gblorb. I couldn't get the Vorple website to display images, even when I ran it on a localhost server, but the gblorb displayed images just fine, so just use that. It's in "Project New Media.materials/Release/The House of Mystery.gblorb".

The puzzles I encountered were interesting, but eventually I got stuck. The game doesn't offer a walkthrough or in-game hints. The game doesn't credit beta testers and has a lot of "You can't see any such thing" errors.

I look forward to a future version of this game.

I don't think the choices make much/any impact on the ending. (Spoiler - click to show)The twist ending was cute, but implausible.

The game has an interesting setting. I didn't like that the game only allowed three actions per day. Since one of which pretty much has to be praying, it allows effectively two actions per day.

This was aggravated by the fact that some of the actions involved randomness, e.g. the (Spoiler - click to show)pace the room action can randomly have a good effect, or it can take days to activate.

(Spoiler - click to show)Especially when you find the hidden journal, it seems ridiculous that it takes five actions—spread out over three days—to read it.

Last, especially since the game includes a lot of right/wrong answers (especially during prayer), it would have been nice to have a more convenient way to replay options, instead of just restarting the whole game from scratch and replaying. Randomness makes replaying all the more tedious if I just want to see the "good" options.

You win American Angst by winning fights. But the fights are just grinds: keep clicking the "hit" button until you randomly win or lose. If you lose, you'll have to go back to the last checkpoint, click through to the combat, and try your luck again. Eventually, you'll succeed.

But the result of this is that none of the combat options mean anything. There's no puzzle, no risk/reward tradeoff, no meaningful tactical situation. Once you grind through the combat, the game runs on rails, with a few arbitrary "left or right?" choices and a few "how brutal do you want to be?" choices.

As for the story, it's an amnesia game, which means that we know nothing about the player character. As a result, it's difficult to care about this character, even when the "surprise twist" is revealed. There are several endings, apparently selected at random based on earlier choices, including one where the bad guy inexplicably explains everything, with hundreds of words of non-interactive exposition, and then (Spoiler - click to show)kills you.

This game was nominated for XYZZY awards for Best Game, Best Writing, and Best Story. I don't see it.

I'm pretty sure there aren't any "instructions" to read. Just click around and enjoy the ambiance.