Reviews by Dan Fabulich

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.

This game has fun retro graphics, and is available for a shockingly large number of old platforms, including Commodore 64, Spectrum, Amiga, Atari ST, and MS-DOS. I played it in its HTML JavaScript version, which is almost certainly the version you should play, if you decide to play it.

Those are the good parts.

As a game, there's not a lot here. The limited parser is kinda buggy, the story is thin, and there are no interesting puzzles.

The game has a bunch of NPCs, but you can only "TALK [PERSON]" and "GIVE/SHOW [OBJECT]" to them. (TALK, GIVE, and SHOW are undocumented verbs.) But even GIVE and SHOW are incompletely implemented.

In order to engage a major NPC with the plot ((Spoiler - click to show)"OMG I'm trapped here and my coachman is missing,") you can't just ask them about it or tell them about it, but you have to find a piece of critical evidence ((Spoiler - click to show)the cloth) and SHOW it to them. Until you do that, TALK just doesn't mention the problem to that NPC. Worse, if you SHOW that critical evidence to anyone else in the game, you get a generic parser error, "That wouldn't help you much." This game would be considerably improved if you could GIVE/SHOW every object to every NPC and get at least a single line of dialog.

And here's another parser bug. (Spoiler - click to show)The priest tells you to get water from the well. But the well has no bucket and no rope, so you have to search for them. When you USE ROPE and USE BUCKET, "You attach the bucket to the rope and pull up a fresh charge of water." Cool. GET WATER. "You can't find it." You have to USE BOTTLE to get the water.

Then there's the story. The game is short, but there's… not much. (Spoiler - click to show)You're stuck in a haunted village. Or maybe you've time-traveled back to the past? You meet some people afraid of ghosts nearby, encounter a vampire attacking your coachman, who runs off when you attack him with a torch. Then you go to sleep, and all of the NPCs are gone (where are your horses?!), except an NPC who said he would help you has apparently been dead for years and has kept the object you gave him "yesterday" with him--buried with his skeleton in his grave. (Why? How?) You then sleep again. (why?) You bring holy soil to the vampire, who for some reason hasn't attacked you in your sleep for the past two days, wake the vampire with the soil, and kill him. And the name of the PC? You were Van Helsing the whole time. This story is paper thin, just enough to motivate the puzzles.

And then there's the puzzles. They're almost all of the form, "examine and search everything, take everything, then USE everything you own," except for sleeping, which is "accomplish all necessary tasks for the day, which are only known to the author, before you're allowed to sleep and progress to the next day."

The final puzzle is an exception to this. (Spoiler - click to show)To open the coffin in the Undercroft, you have to use the blanket upstairs to set a trap, then use the soil downstairs to force the vampire to wake. But the soil solution just sort of assumes you know certain traditional vampire lore. If you try using the soil in the Undercroft too soon, the game says that you need a plan, but the limited parser doesn't provide a way to say "I plan to burn the vampire in the library."

None of the game's puzzles offer any of the virtues of a good puzzle. https://xyzzyawards.org/?p=386 No extent, no explorability, no surprise, no ingenuity, no originality, no structural integration, and barely any narrative integration.

It's a Twine maze. Spooky stuff happens. There are some death endings and one good ending. But, as is typical for mazes, you just have to be persistent and try all of the paths to find the exit. There's no particular reason "left" or "right" is the correct answer in any given situation.

I'm not sure I understood the theme. "You chose this" doesn't feel accurate when I chose "Go right" and I died as a result.

For some reason, the default Twine back button is hidden by default, but if you refresh the page, it will appear.

Here's a walkthrough.

(Spoiler - click to show)
Go forwards
Go left
Take the apple and eat it
Explore the rest of the room
Exit left
Walk forwards
Leave the path and enter the forest
Go left

It's a short game; just follow the on-screen instructions to win. There's not a lot to it.

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