Ratings and Reviews by Dan Fabulich

I went to the trouble of typing in this game from an archived copy of Softline magazine because I had fond memories of playing this game with my dad.

The game itself is playable, and has some cute bits. The centerpiece puzzle with the dragon has adequate clues, I think, and the magic spring puzzle may catch some players pleasantly by surprise.

This game has some "guess the verb" puzzles with non-standard verbs (Spoiler - click to show)(tip, crush) without much hinting.

I'm not categorically opposed to "guess the verb" puzzles, but you can't have a GTV puzzle in a game with a limited parser, because 99% of the time, the verb you'd reasonably guess won't be supported.

For example, you can't (Spoiler - click to show)smash peanut; you can only (Spoiler - click to show)crush peanut.

The backstory was evocative, but it never became relevant to the lock-and-key puzzle the story was actually about.

The game isn't really meant to be played; it's a sample game intended to demonstrate the Adventuron -> Spectrum converter. There's a YouTube video that explain the process.

To be funny, jokes have to be surprising, but inevitable in hindsight. The jokes in this game either don't feel surprising (the Ground Troll is silly!) or don't feel inevitable (what's Mario doing here?).

You can reach a winning 10-pebble ending if you use the back button when you fail, so winning is just a matter of straightforward hard work.

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.