Ratings and Reviews by Rovarsson

The Bones of Rosalinda has a very compelling storyline. The minimally interactive prologue sets the mood, prepares the scene and introduces the characters. The equally minimally interactive epilogue provides very satisfying closure for the story, not only for the protagonist but for the side characters too.
Both are quite long and very well written, giving the player the opportunity to dig in to the story.
In between is, of course, the game. It's up to the player to pick up the introductory setup and carry it through to the finale, jumping through a great deal of hoops large and small while doing so.

The characters in Bones are a joy to get to know. They all have enough detail and glimpses of a backstory so that not one of them feels (or smells) like just having been pressed out of a plastic mold.
I particularly liked Piecrust, a talking mouse with a rather bleak outlook on the world and his future in it, and a distracting enthousiasm for foodstuffs of any kind. The apathetic deadpan delivery of his remarks made me laugh more than once, especially near the beginning of the game.
The elaborate conversations and cutscenes provide the player with background and insights to fully appreciate the characters.

The difficulty of the puzzles was just right for me, once I really got the central gameplay mechanic. It's PC-juggling.The player has to switch player characters with different abilities (and sometimes assemble them...) to solve the problems facing the protagonist.This mechanic is introduced gently and later expanded upon, providing a gentle learning curve.
Besides the PC-juggling there is also inventory-juggling. Lots of it. A shortcut to directly GIVE an object from one PC to the next without first dropping it would be nice. Also, (Spoiler - click to show)the ability to ATTACH limbs straight out of the backpack would come in handy.
Most of the puzzles are variations on the lock-and-key theme. The Bones of Rosalinda shows with gusto that original variations on that theme are still possible. Very satisfying.

I had a blast playing through this game. Highly recommended!

For reasons of social standing and thievery opportunities, Lady Thalia is spending the summer in Paris. And my my, what a coincidence, so is Scotland Yard investigator Margaret Williams (Melpomene/Mel for anyone foolish enough to want to annoy her... like Thalia). Mel is Thalia's nemesis (or the other way around...), in proper Holmes/Moriarty-parlance. But there seems to be something else brooding under the surface too...

These characters had fantastic chemistry between them in Lady Thalia and the Seraskier Sapphires. In Lady Thalia and the Rose of Rocroi this is continued, but the authors take it a step further. In this installment you alternate between the characters. This gives the player the opportunity to see both characters and their relationship through the eyes of the other. Mind you, although the player can guide the interactions between Mel and Thalia through the choice of clicks, she cannot shape the characters' nature. Both Mel and Thalia will stay true to themselves in how they respond to the player choices.

Lady Thalia and the Rose of Rocroi is written in the second person perspective, as is habitual in IF. Often the second person can feel as if a third party is telling the player ("You") what the PC does/sees/feels. A tad distancing.
Here however, the second person leans very much towards the intimacy of the first person point of view. It feels as if there is a very personal inner voice acting as narrator, instead of an external overseer.

The use of language is beautiful. It is unassuming, not drawing too much attention to itself. It is efficient and practical. And there are truly wonderful sentences to be found.

--After your unfortunate experience last night, you have decided to cheer yourself up with an easy theft — stealing a work by a minor painter from a minor museum.

On a larger scale, the writing is also very strong. The game has splendid pacing and rhythm. It somehow made me think of a Nirvana song, with its slow but tense verses (the preparation for the heist) alternated with a fast and frantic chorus (the escape after the heist). I must admit that the degree of franticality in my escapes could have been significantly lower if I had been more careful in the preparatory stages...

This structure does run the risk of feeling artificial and predictable, a framework that the narrative has been made to fit into. Fortunately, the final Act shakes it up somewhat. Also, this is a game, not a novel. Clear level structure helps the player see the objectives of the game.

There is no way to lose in Lady Thalia. There is a scoring system that makes fun of itself, if you care for points and statistics.
Freed from the fear of losing moves, the solutions to the puzzles are wholly a matter of player preference. Subtlety and finesse are more in-character, but violence can surely be the answer (maybe even the funnier answer...)

Go meet Mel and Thalia. You will not regret it.

The Great Archeological Race and I got off on the wrong foot. It threw a bunch of typos at me and I responded with some harsh words shouted at the screen.

Escalation of the argument ensued. The Great Archeological Race tested my patience to no end with a 10-move-long cab drive where each Z was followed by a boring description of a city block, with nothing to do. I retaliated in a threatening manner, typing QUIT and only at the last second answering "NO" to the confirmationary question ("Do you really want to quit?" it asked in a more docile tone).

We had arrived at the airport by then. Wandering through the terminal in search of the correct departure gate, we settled into an uneasy peace. I started to realize that maybe The Great Archeological Race was really doing its best, that it simply was not made for literary greatness. Even then, the least it could do was make an effort to understand the simple English sentences I spoke to it despondently and perhaps have a synonym or two or three in its vocabulary.

But finally, when we arrived in little village called Hareda, in the middle of the Brazilian Jungle, perseverance was rewarded.

We found a strange machine to produce some necessary gear, and we promised to help out the desperate rubber manufacturer whose mailbag of post orders had been stolen. We prevailed over the bandit in a random and haphazardly sort of way.

And we found the fabled cave of treasures. There was a rather heated argument once again when I found The Great Archeological Race had not properly signalled a matchbook I needed to infiltrate the dark tunnels, resulting in our repeating the whole ordeal with the cab ride and the tedious airport corridors. But now we were focused, joined in our shared goal of finding the hidden treasures that would help us open the doors to the inner sanctum.

After cleverly putting together the clues to navigate the cave halls and their obstacles, and after mapping out an easy maze, we basked in the glory of having found the Crystal Cave.

It glittered.

[I played on the BeebEm emulator]

In the early 1980s BBC Micro computers were getting widely distributed in English schools. A group of members of the Association of Teachers of Mathematics (cool acronym -> ATOM) decided to use the Micro and its ability to play text games as a teaching tool.

While they were at it, they also managed to create a fantastic text-adventure.

The intro swoops you from a soothing pastoral outdoors scene (lying in the grass under a tree, your sister reading a book, birds chittering in the sun... my imagination may be filling in some details) to the halls and corridors of a puzzle-palace.

L: A Mathemagical Adventure came out in 1984. It has a two-word parser that sometimes left me scratching my head, figuring out how to phrase a command. Nothing that kept me for too long though. There is no VERBOSE option, so when you re-enter a room you need to LOOK if you've forgotten where the exits were. And forget about EXAMINE. What's in the room description is all you're going to get.

Despite these limitations, the setting and the writing do not feel sparse at all. Upon first entering a room, you are treated to a clear and sometimes elaborate description that paints an evocative atmosphere of a now-dark abandoned palace.

Abandoned? Not completely.

A Drogon Robot Guard appears! These adversaries come at you at random intervals and try to imprison you. Defeating them is one of the simpler puzzles of the game, but I urge you to at least let them take you to the cell once. Escaping is fun!

Spread across the map, there are a number of NPCs. These are of the cardboard cutout variety, but they are introduced in vivid descriptions. Some need your help, some offer to help you. Invariably, you will need to solve a math-related problem to obtain the clues or objects they have to offer.

As should be clear from the title and the creators, the puzzles are all in some way related to mathematics. There are a lot of different approaches though. There is code-breaking, geometrical puzzling, logical reasoning and some straightforward calculation. In many puzzles, your imagination is supported by colourful visual representations.
I found all the puzzles fair and solvable. I did however sneak a peek at Wikipedia for some of the mathematical terminology I did not know. (Perfect squares and cubes.)

L: A Mathemagical Adventure is a great game for the avid map maker that I am. Despite being a mathematics-inspired game, the map is anything but orderly or symmetrical. Upstairs, downstairs, indoors and outdoors, tunnels looping back, a small maze and an octogonal room with exits on all sides. I had a lot of fun with my coloured markers.

There is some kind of plot going on about rescuing a girl who knows the weaknesses of the Drogon Overlords. Even if you save the girl from captivity though, this plot is never quite resolved. Maybe ATOM wanted to leave room for a sequel? But the plot is not what drives this game. It's all about nifty puzzles and great atmosphere.

A real treat!

The neighborhood-crazy-lady has taken your skateboard away! Your plan is to get it back. Preferably without falling into her claws yourself.

I have a thing for this kind of setting. The one creepy house in an otherwise friendly street where the children cross when they have to go by. Where the adults secretly want to cross too, were it not for the adult-voices telling them not to be ridiculous...
(I think this goes back to my reading The Dark Tower Pt.3 at a young and impressionable age. The scenes where Jake has to go through the House/Guardian to get to Roland on the other side haunted my dreams for weeks.)

Sometimes it's a long-abandoned ruin of a house. Sometimes there were people murdered in it and it's rumoured to be haunted.

In Mrs. Pepper's Nasty Secret it's the lone inhabitant that's scary. (Shhh... People whisper she's a witch...)

The introduction and the first part of the game do a very good job at establishing Mrs. Pepper as a child-hating, basketball-stabbing, skateboard-stealing hag. I wandered around on the sidewalk for some time before timidly setting foot on her driveway.

After the first big hurdle though, the game settles down a bit and leaves you to explore the house and its surroundings at your leisure.

Despite having a small map, Mrs Pepper makes very good use of the space. there are numerous locked-off locations to discover. In fact, most of the puzzles do exactly that: blocking parts of the house until you figure out some way to remove the obstacle (or simply find the keys...)

I liked chatting to the next-door NPC a lot. In between the gossip, there are clues and help.

A nifty and completely ridiculous (in a good way!) magic system is employed in the later stages of the game. It had me laughing when I visualized what my PC looked like while performing spells...

My hunger for a bit more salt has much to do with the game's context. It was entered in the 2008 IFBeginnersComp and as such is on the easy side. The important objects are basically right in front of your eyes, and in the one instance where they're not, the text nanny-clues you to the right command. There are pushy suggestions from the parser about what to type and a somewhat overzealous auto-correct feature. (These are nags from me taking the game away from its intended context and audience, not faults of the game or the authors.)

Good for beginners as well as more experienced players: the game sports an excellent gradual hint-system.

Actually, Mrs.Pepper's Nasty Secret accomplishes its goal admirably. It welcomes new players with all possible means. It has an engaging plot and interesting NPCs that both new and seasoned players can appreciate.

I just wish there was a "Hard" setting.

Well-written, smooth-playing creepy-house adventure entertainment, good to last you an hour or two/three. Recommended.