Ratings and Reviews by Dan Fabulich

A delightful appetizer.

The web version includes lovely background music by Julian K. Jarboe, don't miss out!

It was a little hard to guess the command to get started, so here's my gift to you: (Spoiler - click to show)touch sunlight with leaf

A short, simple work in Twine, with a nice photo on every page.

This seems to be a game where you have to go from room to room examining everything. But the game doesn't follow the BENT rule (Bracket Every Notable Thing), so it often describes things that can't be examined.

In the living room, for example:

"You are standing in the Living Room, the heart of the home. The majority of the hardwood floor is covered with a worn carpet of a repetitive design. Dark wooden paneling line the walls, matched by equally dark baseboard, poorly joined in the corners. Simple furniture and few knick-knacks decorate this room. Uncle Clem seems to have lived a simple life, with the bare essentials"

You can't examine the floor, the carpet, the paneling, the furniture, or the knick-knacks, ("You can't see any such thing") but you must examine the baseboard.

The whole game is like this! I gave up after trying to examine everything I reasonably could in seven rooms and never finding anything that I would call a "puzzle" or even a goal.

Maybe hints would help?

This game is quite funny and charmingly poignant, which is perhaps no surprise coming from the author of Animalia.

Be advised that what happens on each planet is randomized, so the game is certainly worth replaying.

A game where you can use verbs like "reminisce."

I recommend typing "help" even if you're very comfortable with text adventures. (For example, this is a game where you must (Spoiler - click to show)search.)

A hint: (Spoiler - click to show)You'll have to do the card last.

This game is an adaptation of a 1932 book, Minute Mysteries by H.A. Ripley. If you've read Encyclopedia Brown, you know what it's like.

Each case is a short story ending in a question. In the paper book version, you're meant to try to deduce the answer, then flip to the back of the book to see if you were right. In the ebook version up on Gutenberg.org, you can click a link to skip ahead to the right answer.

Here in this Twine version, the mysteries are posed as multiple-choice questions. But these questions are typically "yes/no" or "murder/suicide" questions, which don't work as a way of evaluating whether the reader correctly understood the mystery.

In most cases, the story is usually a tale told by a character, and the Twine version asks, "did the character tell the truth?" But if the character had told the truth, then there would be no mystery. So in literally all of the cases where the game asks, "is this true?" the answer is "no." In almost all cases where the question is "murder or suicide?" the answer is "murder," though it's always "the opposite of what the characters think/say it is."

For example, take the very first mystery, "A Crack Shot." In the story, a character named Butler tells a story of an accidental shooting. The game asks, "was this an accident or murder?" You can easily guess that it was murder, without even reading the story, because there would be no mystery otherwise.

But in the original novel, which you can read on gutenberg.org, the story just tells you it was murder on the last line.

There, the story ends like this: "‘Why did you deliberately murder Marshall?’ demanded Fordney abruptly ... ‘for that’s what you did.’" And then the story asks, "How did the Professor know Butler had murdered his companion?"

That is the right question to ask, but it doesn't make sense to pose it as a multiple-choice question; it would be much too obvious to reveal the the answer on a menu of options.

I think this would have been a better adaptation if it had adhered more closely to the ebook. Ask me "how did he know?" but just let me click a link to see the answer; don't attempt to keep score. Also, rather than splitting up the main part of the story onto multiple pages, keep the whole setup on one page, so I can scroll back and review it!

(In fairness, it works a lot better when the game offers a list of suspects—even when it's just two suspects.)

P.S. There's a bug on Case 9 where the answers are reversed; if you click "educated" the game thinks you clicked "illiterate"; if you click "illiterate" the game thinks you clicked "educated."

P.P.S. I think the quotations work better with author citations. The original book included authorship citations for each quotation.

All of the endings are about what the main character won't do, and why.

(Spoiler - click to show)
"I won't waive my right to wear charms. The dread eye can hit the dirt."
"I won't sign. If they want my breath, they can draw it, jar it, shelve it themselves."
"I won't have need much longer. Services (assemblies, deliveries) are for moving parts only."
"I won't want for anything come summer. Mountains will scurry hither over my doorsill."
"I won't repeat myself again. This slingstone breaks brows as sure as the sun will scour."
"I won't dignify such a ceremony with lip service. They ate my heart and deemed it 'plummy'."

As of the moment I write this review, IFDB and the game's website says that there's a critical bug in Release 1 (regarding an apple) that, as far as I can see, makes that puzzle unsolvable (unless you read the bug warning, I suppose). It seems like that would justify a subsequent release, but, uh, I guess it's not forthcoming?

A number of the puzzles didn't feel very fair to me.

(Spoiler - click to show)
• You have to "set" the minute hand and the hour hand. Turning them, pushing them, or doing anything to the dial does nothing useful.
• You have to clean the muddy wall with a rag. Fine, but everything's covered in mud/water in that room, and the rag describes a spaceship, indicating that the rag is meant to be used in a sci-fi setting, which this isn't.
• The Cragne Manor room might be my least favorite room from Cragne Manor, because its parser is so horribly picky. You have to "fill" the urn or "bail" the grave, but the parser errors if you "get" the water. And when you get to the bottom, "something pokes through the mud here" but the parser errors if you try to examine the something or get it. You have to "dig", and you can't just "dig", oh no, you have to "dig WEST". Why??
• Apparently fish eat popcorn? And when they do, they go away??


I could never have finished the game without peeking at the source code available on the game's website. I think a few of these fixes (including that critical bug fix, eh?) would make this game a lot more accessible.