Ratings and Reviews by Juhana

This game is way too good to be so short. The one puzzle it has is excellent and then - it ends. It's like watching 5 minutes of Indiana Jones or getting a plate of delicious dessert with one spoonful left. The author twists the knife by making the game deliberately look like the last puzzle of a grand adventure.

I like to think that during the last 8 years after the publication of SMatJEoW (yikes!) the author has been expanding it to a full-blown game and just waits for the right moment to publish it. One has to have dreams, right...?

I might not be the best person to review this game since I have no experience of the retro-hack'n'slash RPG scene the game apparently parodies. Some people might enjoy playing this more than I did.

Calling the game interactive fiction could perhaps be questioned. The Z-code parser has been reduced to six commands; gameplay consists mainly of primitive randomized combats and moving around the map; the story is nearly non-existent; items have rarely any descriptions (on the plus side there are many library messages so the items look like they were described). It felt more like playing a low-end Nethack clone than a work of IF.

Humor is absurd, even surreal (try talking to your bag) - mostly I didn't get it but as I said before, people with RPG experience might be laughing their guts out. The accompanying material is extensive and at a glance looks exquisitely made so an additional star for that. One might ask if the material was made to support the game or is it the other way around?

Contrary to almost all other one-room games, the goal is not to escape but to secure the room so that the bad guy doesn't get in. This is a refreshing new look at the genre and the game handles the setting quite well.

There's a time limit but it serves a purpose: every time when the time runs out and the room is not secure enough the game tells what part of the room you missed. This is infinitely better than getting a general "you died"-message without a clue how to improve the next time. It's not even annoying to die several times because each time you are making progress.

Some minor design and parser problems keep this from being a five-star game. Objects can be examined exactly once, then you get the generic "nothing special"-message. At least in one point the story suggests that an item is essential to solve the game (it is not) but recovering it is not possible and there's no indication later that it's not necessary.