Reviews by Dan Fabulich

It's a spooky Lovecraftian game, a bit overwritten. ("The vacant church is in a state of great decrepitude" could be "is decrepit.")

Once you find the first body, it's not clear why you'd hang around town rather than fleeing.

The game has mazes, but they're combination locks, where you find directions from point to point; they're not meant to be solved in the traditional way by dropping items. I still don't love that; I'd prefer a "go to happy cow farm" command, where you can only go there once you have directions.

It's a pity that it only works on Windows; I don't see anything about this game that wouldn't work just as well (or better) in Inform.

The music only 45 seconds long, and looping, which gets annoying pretty quickly.

No rating; I haven't finished yet.

This game is short; you'll probably finish in 20 minutes or less. The game has a turn tracker (you have to get to the train before noon), but, in practice, the tracker is just an annoyance: you're probably going to run out of time on your first playthrough, and then you'll restart the game and play through more efficiently.

The music is fun, and the puzzles are fair, but kinda fiddly.

(Spoiler - click to show)The game wasn't clear enough about where I needed to stand to get the fishing pole and the gem at the bridge. It would say "you can't reach it from here," but why not? Do I need to wade deeper into the water? Is the pole on the east side of the bridge? The west side? Do I need to be standing on the bridge, or on the stepping stones?

Instead, you kinda need to guess that there are four locations in this area (west of the bridge, east of the bridge, standing on the bridge, and standing on the stones) and try to get the items at each of those locations by trial and error.

When dispersing the magpies, I had to "throw" the gem at the magpies, but I couldn't just "give" the gem to the magpies, or "drop" the gem and leave, and it's not clear why.

The game's not done yet; it's being released chapter by chapter. The last chapter is scheduled to be released in July.

Tip for the author: invite me to subscribe to some kinda notification when new chapters are released!

I'm not sure this game really works that well if you've never seen the iCarly Nickelodeon TV show, but there's a lot of heart and soul in this game. It describes itself as a "horror" game, and certainly there are horror elements, but I'd describe it as a game about dealing with grief and guilt through the metaphor of Lovecraftian creepypasta horror tropes.

The game feels fun, noir-y, but it has a number of bugs that forced me back to the in-game hints too often. (And even those have bugs, at least as of Release 1.)

I posted a big list of bugs on the intfiction forum. https://intfiction.org/t/the-big-fall-a-1947-detective-story/51435/5?u=dfabulich

My biggest issue with this game is plot-related.

(Spoiler - click to show)Why did Dixie (the mob boss) let Sylvia live? Why are the cops trying to kill me in the final scene? Shouldn't they just arrest me?

It seems like the game is being noir-y at the expense of its own plot.

I think if the bugs were fixed, this could be at least three stars, and if the plot issues are addressed, it could be four or five stars.

There's a lot of fun poetic imagery in this piece. It ends quite abruptly, and won't take more than a few minutes if you play it as I did.

(Spoiler - click to show)INVENTORY, then EXAMINE all of the stuff in the satchel. The game will suggest that you can CHANGE the stuff, so CHANGE all of the feelings, one at a time. Then you can trivially GO EAST and WAIT a turn to win that way, or CUT BRAMBLES and GO WEST and WAIT a turn to win that way.

EDIT: (Spoiler - click to show)You can also optionally help the traveler, who appears fifteen turns into the game. You can GET ODDMENTS (twice), GIVE ODDMENTS TO TRAVELER, and then TRAVELER, CHANGE MOMENTS.

Maybe there was another way to win? Maybe there's more to it? Or maybe that's all there is.

There's not a lot to it, (the game is over before you know it) but the puzzles are fair, and there's some cute stuff. I look forward to the author's future work.

I didn't think it was fair that (Spoiler - click to show)the game docks you three points for turning on the TV.

You're a deer. You do deer things. It's pretty cute. The whole game is over in 10 to 15 minutes, maybe 30 if you decide to use the back button to explore all endings.

The language is strange, perhaps intentionally strange, but at some places it seems just accidentally ungrammatical.

(Spoiler - click to show)At one point, you meet a deer who's hurt, and you have the option to try to save the deer. You do, but the other deer then apparently walks away from the accident, apparently uninjured…? This seems like a bug.

The game is pretty easy. The murderer and the alibis are selected at random. (Spoiler - click to show)Only the murderer has no alibi, falsely claiming "I was in place X; character Y saw me there" but when you ask character Y, Y will say that they didn't see the murderer. You go outside, accuse one person, and the game ends.

I would have liked the puzzle to include a little more depth, something that gave me a sense of surprise (while still being solvable in hindsight).

I don't know why, but in Chrome 89 for macOS 11.2.3, the sound effects were horribly choppy. I switched to Safari 14 and it worked much better. It appears that opening this game (or any Strand game?) pins a CPU in Chrome.

The voices sounded computer generated, which was weird, but sometimes they really worked. I'd be curious to learn more about how the author made these sounds.

The premise of this game is pretty zany, and I enjoyed that. But I wanted a little something more after (Spoiler - click to show)getting the "true ending" and learning her name.

The About screen has a "Spoiler" section that explains the entire plot, to help make sense of it if you're still confused after seeing all of the endings.

(Spoiler - click to show)My feeling is that while the twist ending #5 is surprising, I feel like I wanted to do something more with the discovery. I randomly stumbled across ending #5 fairly early on and explored the rest of the endings using the back button. Some games give you one last "real ending" to discover after you've discovered all of the other endings; I think this game would really benefit from that. Maybe ending #2 could have a variant ending #8 if you've previously seen ending #5, where you ask for her help and she gives you a name, or something like that.