Reviews by Rovarsson

[A short bespectacled man runs into the printing press hall. He's frantically waving a crumpled piece of yellowish paper above his head, the static electricity making his hair stand on end.]

-"Where's the boss? Where is the one responsible for reviews? Or better, where is the one who writes all those "Top 100"-lists and those "Best 50"-articles and the Recommended-pages? I need to talk to the one in charge!"

[The boy at the huge black press-machine, his hand still on the big red STOP-button, lifts his cap and scratches his head.]

-"Well sir, I don't know of any boss of the top-lists. I doubt there is such a person. It's all rather more the work of the IF-community as a whole."

-"Now, now, youngun! No need for such foul language! So, I.F. Community, eh? Never heard of him. Or her, for that matter. Strange name, if you ask me.
I suspect Mr. or Mrs. Community is not here? Of course not. Well, you'll have to do. Get your leadtype out, boy, I'll dictate the article. And you make sure this gets on the front page of this Text-Game-gazette or whatever it is you're running here!"

[The boy opens his mouth, trying to clear up the misunderstanding, but the bespectacled man already charges ahead, reading loudly from his crumpled paper.]


T-Zero; A text-adventure for the ages!

A young man wakes up in the dry leaves of the forest floor. Former Librarian and Custodian of the Museum, Count Zero has dismissed him of his duties. He had been snooping around in the vicinity of the restricted areas a little too much lately.
Our protagonist is certain he is on to something however, and he will not give up before he has got to the bottom of it. That his curiosity will lead him through the boundaries of time, he did not expect. Still, courageously he presses onward, determined to set things right.

--"They tirelessly twirl in a circular swirl."--

The writing in T-Zero is exquisite. Poetic, evocative, engaging, the descriptions of locations and actions give the game a rhythm that takes the player from the real and concrete to the dream-like and back without breaking the continuity of the story.
Good writing is indeed of the utmost importance to do justice to this quite intricate story. After the initial exploration of the Museum and its surroundings in the Present, the protagonist gains the means and the knowledge to travel to Past and Future to tweak the outcome of events just so to gain victory over Count Zero's plan to enslave humanity. This involves fiddling with the state of the Past to gain access to puzzle solutions in the Present, which in turn set up the Future for your chance of besting Count Zero, the Time Smith.

To keep up the flow of this excellent writing, the author has opted to leave the exits out of the room description. Instead there is an EXITS-command that will drily list available directions. This command does not take a turn, and I did not mind reflexively typing it as I was mapping the game-area.

The map plays a huge part in the enjoyment of the atmosphere of this game. It is big and readily accessible, except for some well-planned bottlenecks with puzzle-locks to help with the story's pacing and to prevent the story from becoming incomprehensibly befuddling.
Many locations will seem inert at first, having no apparent interactive content or even purpose apart form being an expendable room. Most of these will come into play in the other ages you will visit, becoming an influence that moves through time.

It is a joy to re-explore the map in each era, comparing the different times. The locations and their relations will be subtly different each time, giving a fresh and surprising look at known ground.

While the story and writing of T-Zero are mindboggling in the best sense of the word, some of the puzzles are the opposite.
First: many of the puzzles are standard adventure-fare. They can be obvious or more original, but they stay within the comfortable zone of puzzle-design: the commands necessary to influence the game, the mental picture of possibilities and options to tackle an obstacle.
But then there are the perplexing puzzles. Not because they are difficult in a normal adventuring context, but because they draw on a set of knowledge and inspiration that most IF-players will not access in this context. Some of these puzzles are of the satisfying think-outside-the-box variety. bringing great joy to the player. All of them depend on the player's knowledge of a very English language and popular culture. Joyful as they may be to the player who is in-the-know, in general these are just plain unfair.

Many, if not all, default responses are personalized, most times in a beautifully literate one-sentence gem. In case of an ambiguity between nouns in a command, the game lists all the options in a menu, allowing you to choose the one you meant. Practical, but also evidence of how user-friendly the game desires to be, despite the mindblowing puzzles.
Also very practical are the location-specific hints. They helped me on many occassions with a gentle nudge. On the other hand, there were times when the hints just confirmed I had the right idea, but I still needed a walkthrough to find the proper syntax.

As is to be expected; time plays a very big role in T-Zero. It pervades the entire game. Since time is elapsing and day is followed by night, you can expect some solutions to puzzles also being time-dependent. While most of the time this adds to the anticipation, it can also mean a boring few minutes typing WAIT over and over if you were a few moves late to a specific location and you have to wait an entire day without anything else to do. (This happened to me once, but it was all a result of my own bad timing/planning.)
Tricky: you have to revisit some rooms after your first exploration. Some objects just pop up after a while without there being a reason or an obvious notification from the game about this.

Lastly, I would like to point your attention to the rag man. While he doesn't have much to say, he is a pretty nifty NPC. Without wanting to give too much away, this character teeters constantly on the edge of the game-world and our own. I spent a lot of time musing about the kind of reality he goes to after I type QUIT.

T-Zero is a mindbogglingly good game. Best enjoyed with a walkthrough on the side.


[The short bespectacled man crumples the now sweaty paper in his hands into a ball and throws it in the nearest bin.]

-"You got all that, boy? Make sure it's on this issue's front page, you hear me!? Or else..."

[Before the boy can say anything more, the man leaves the printing hall, contentedly rubbing his hands together. He even hops a little out of joy over a job well done.]

The intro to Everybody Loves a Parade sets you up for a fast and funny ride. The game itself does not disappoint. It picks up the joke ball where it landed and runs with it. Fast.

You are a female engineer (the female part becomes important near the end of the game) hauling all your stuff coast to coast through the U.S. of A in a moving van on your way to a new job in New York. Although you had written a warning against driving through Arizona all over your roadmap, this is exactly where you end up: in a small town in the middle of the Arizona desert. Where they are having a parade. And one of the floats, a pickup truck full of pebbles, broke down. Up to you to get the parade and yourself moving again.
(About those pebbles, the people of this town seem to have a very peculiar and unexplained obsession with rocks. All kinds of rocks...)

Fast and funny, I said. The game has only twelve locations, so exploring the entire map does not take a lot of time. All those locations are packed full of action. Lots and lots of NPCs, most of whom brush you off in funny ways, are going about their personal business. The author has put in the effort to write many different events for each NPC, so the whole town seems bustling with activity. The writing keeps you on your toes, trying to keep up with the next thing that's going to happen. You need to pay attention to separate the important stuff from the background ambiance of the parade.

To keep this fast and witty atmosphere going, Everybody Loves a Parade is very thoroughly implemented. The game recognizes all nouns and synonyms. I even found two nouns that were only implied by the room description. Many, many actions that do not have anything to do with winning the game are implemented, so if you're stuck on a puzzle, you can go have fun trying to poke the outer reaches of what commands you can type. Add to this that many default responses have been personalized and adapted to the locations, and you will find that the atmosphere is almost unbreakable.

The puzzles are good. In such a small map, there is at least one, sometimes more puzzles in each room. They are all in plain sight from the start of the game. I did find it hard to find the first loose thread, since all the puzzles are arranged as a chain. Solving one gives you access to the next.
The puzzles are diverse. Some just require good old adventuring skills to get the missing parts, so you'll want to X the heck out of everything. Others require multiple steps to manipulate an NPC into doing what you need. So talk to everyone.

I finished this game in two afternoons and I had a lot of fun from start to finish. I advise everyone to do the same. Enjoy

He's got a bad case of the hay fevers! Can't even look at stuff without his eyes watering.

Yes, the protagonist of Birmingham IV has a chronic eye-disorder. Every single time he examines something: "Predictably, the Phil's eyes water." His other problem is that throughout the game, he is consistently called "The Phil". I have no problem with third person narrative. It establishes a different kind of player-PC relationship that helps define the feel of a game. However, here it sounds more like the protagonist is a rambling braggart with delusions of grandeur narrating his own exploits. (This is probably not the case, but I found it fun to imagine my PC going about his explorations while describing his every move.)

This rambling-about-his-own-exploits protagonist is actually perfectly in line with my biggest gripe about the game: What the FULLGRU am I doing here?!

Apparently The Phil has woken up in a fantasy-dreamland (trolls & dwarves elves & all). He starts wandering around poking everything he comes across and taking whatever he sees. Out of pure curiosity he seeks out puzzles to solve but it is never clear what his goal actually is. Halfway through the game, a proper endgoal crystallizes: clear up the mess he has caused by thoughtlessly (some might say ruthlessly) tackling obstacles for no apparent reason.

The land the Phil is roaming is nicely described. There are (on my map) five distinct regions that all lie along a long E-W road. So that's good for visualizing the geography. Unfortunately, due to an inventory limit and some less-than-practical puzzle layout (1980s oldschool style and all that...) you will travel this road until you can dream it and then some more.

The puzzles you encounter range from "Great!" ((Spoiler - click to show)laying out breadcrumbs for the puddytat...) to "Huh?" ((Spoiler - click to show)lighting the lamp...) to "Jeeves! Get-me-my-walkthrough!" ((Spoiler - click to show)a not-cool-not-clever maze that is only justified because everybody knows that Elves are obnoxious tricksters seeking to confobble people at every turn.)

The writing is good. I really enjoyed the descriptions of the Elven Mound and the Plains by the River. There is a lot of humour in the responses too, and there are tons of unnecessary but funny stuff to try (including dying in many ways) (Oh, that reminds me... About those puzzles: Learn by dying. A lot.)
But despite the funny and overall good writing, the lack of an overarching goal or quest made it all feel a bit too light and unimportant to me.

So: a nice big game, lots of laughs without any (heart)strings attached.
Worth playing.

After lying through your teeth about your lockpicking skills (which are non-existent), you were allowed into the Thieves' Guild. However, instead off stealing old ladies handbags, you are sent to a mysterious island, a letter from the Guild Master with your objective in your pocket.

Isle of the Cult starts out very laid-back and lighthearted. So much so that when a) the letter with your goal on it turns out to be illegibly smudged by seawater, and b) the fishing boat that dropped you off sails away with your burglar's gear still in it, you decide to just wing it without any equipment.

So you set off to explore the island and you soon come across remnants of an old civilization: an abandoned village and two temples on a hill. The ex-inhabitants of the village probably said to each other: "Hey, if ever a lone adventurer comes this way, we might as well make them feel welcome!", and left a few easy obstacles in the way. "The way" being a straight north-south avenue with buildings to the sides.

Things change when you get to the southern part of the island. Here, narrow paths wind through the jungle to isolated locations, ravines and streams block your path. In the center of the jungle a great fog-tipped mountain looms. There are harder puzzles you must solve to get to locked off areas of the map. Not harder as in complicated, but cunningly deceiving, making you look one way while the solution is right under your nose. Quite exhilarating to solve these, really. A few red herrings are thrown in for good measure, and these add to the overall abandoned island-feel.

The writing in Isle of the Cult is not remarkable but it is efficient and to the point. Storywise there is hardly any story or plot to speak of. This is an oldschool puzzle adventure. But it is an excuisitely polished one. The author has thought of many unnecessary or "wrong" actions and has provided appropriate, helpful or funny responses. Your movements are described tersely, reminding you that you are crossing jungle-terrain, not just going E or N on a grid.

A smooth and sometimes misleading adventure. Nothing groundbreaking, but very well made. A joy to play.

Because, strangely, there is no inn in this otherwise standard Fantasy adventure.

I say standard, but it's actually a very good game.

After a lengthy but very funny introductory scene where you, the smith's apprentice, are appointed "volunteer" by the villagers to kill the dragon and get its treasures (the town has a bit of a tax-problem), you find yourself in a traditional Fantasy land. After talking to all the villagers and starting to explore a bit, you remember that aside from funny narrators, hidden treasure and a wizard in his tower, old-school Fantasy adventures also tend to be Big and Difficult.

-Setting: The entire map (minus a handful of hidden locations) is accessible from the get-go. The game thus has a great sense of spaciousness. The boundaries of the playable area are also very naturally worked into the narrative. There are mountain ranges with their peaks stretching out as far as you can see, grassplains too big to cross where you see the next town shimmering against the horizon, the ocean shore where you can just see the barbaric islands through the mist...
There are many, many locations. It helps a lot that they are geographically ordered. From the central village, you can choose to go to the river/swamp region, the forest or the rocky hills. The wizard's tower lies on its own mountain peak.
Some of these locations are truly beautiful: a hidden lake seen from a cliff above, a lone giant tree in the forest, the tower seen from a hill top far away...
The openness of the game world does mean that it can be hard to find that next loose thread while puzzle-solving, meaning that you will see some of the locations so many times that you don't care about that wonderfully described scenery anymore.

-Puzzles: The puzzles in The Windhall Chronicles are a mixed batch.
The three parts of the Wizardry-test are great. They are followed by a logic puzzle that I took out my chess pawns for and had a lot of fun solving. Most puzzle fans will probably have seen it in some form before though. There's a fetch-quest for the wood-elf that I found very enjoyable, and then there's the Mire Cat's riddle.
Then there are some puzzles that make sense,...in hindsight. The kind where you couldn't possibly tell what other function an object might have. Or where the sequence of actions is underclued.
One or two puzzles just make you go "Huh?" after finally checking the walkthrough.
It's a shame that the final puzzle, the dragon-fight, is completely clear and obvious (which I find a good thing for a final puzzle),but not described clearly enough to solve it while staying in the flow and thrill of the endgame.

-NPCs: To solve the puzzles, there are many characters that will help you. That is, if you help them first of course... This leads to some interesting fetch-quests and some funny conversations. It also adds to the feel of the game that all the characters have different opinions of one another, giving you a glimpse of the town's social dynamics.
Very important here is that all the characters (you/the protagonist included) have sleep cycles. Wildly differing sleep cycles... Your dwarven master gets up at 5:30 while the lazy alchemist doesn't wake up before 10:30 am. Some crucial information has to be got from an insomniac knight who doesn't show himself until after dark... Sometimes you can be forced to WAIT twenty turns because the character you have business with is still asleep. (Knocking on their door doesn't help...)
On the other hand, it is very rewarding to plan out your actions so that you can solve a puzzle and give the result to a character just as they get up. Therefore, I strongly recommend copying the sleep times from the walkthrough. They are all listed at the top of the page.

-Writing: The writing is good, sometimes very good. I only found a handful of typos, which is not a lot in a game this size. Some location descriptions are simply beautiful, but the prose does turn a bit purple after you solve some key puzzles. Also, both the intro and the epilogue are very wordy. Well written, but wordy.
The writing is also truly funny at times. Can't say much without giving the away the jokes but: (Spoiler - click to show)the shed falling apart when you turn the long-sought-after key...

So:
-The sense of space, Fantasy feel, natural borders and wonderful surroundings make this gameworld a joy to explore.
-The lack of pacing/bottlenecks, the sleep cycles and the undercluedness of some puzzles can lead to pointless wandering.

All in all, I was absorbed in this game for a week, often pondering puzzles in bed and coming up with new things to try.

Strongly recommended.

(If you enjoy this kind of text adventure, be sure to check out Larry Horsfield's Alaric Blackmoon-series)

"You have discovered the secret of the Theatre and have completed the game with a score of fifty out of a possible fifty in one thousand, one hundred and fifty-eight turns."

Yes, and I enjoyed every single one of those turns!

I'm not normally one to test my wits against what is described as a puzzlefest, most of the time enjoying more story-oriented IF. Once in a while though, I like to crack my noggin on some oldschool puzzles. I've given up on "Curses!" thrice already and "Christminster"'s opening scene sent me screaming to my walkthrough.

Theatre was different though. I never got completely lost, always having at least one clear goal. The solutions to the puzzles were always fair, also the ones that I didn't get. The very vague in-game hints were enough for me until very late in the game, and even then the problem was adventurer's fatigue on my part, not having explored thoroughly enough.

The setting and descriptions are creepy enough, but I never felt fear or horror. Instead I was excited and curious the whole time about what would be around the next corner of this sprawling run-down Theatre.

"Theatre" does show its oldschool heritage: a key gratuitously hidden on the opposite side of the map from the door it's supposed to open, picking up everything that's not cemented to the floor to use it in a puzzle far down the road. Apparently ghosts have made a hobby of tearing up diaries and spreading the pages all over the place for no apparent reason...

The backstory was just good enough to be interesting in its own right, but it's not much more than a fragmented Lovecraftian template that supports the dark and damp atmosphere.

The great puzzles mostly revolve around getting to the next part of the map, getting "around the corner" as it were, in varying original ways.

There are glimpses of true genius here, especially one "puzzle that isn't": (Spoiler - click to show)"Tunnels go out in all directions." is not limited to the compass directions. This one had me stumped for a long while, and it was an exhilarating feeling when it finally *clicked*.

A fantastic experience, well recommended!

I must confess to a serious character flaw, a deeply rooted chasm that runs through the heart of my being. It is a source of frustration and temptation, it leads me to reach above my abilities and cheat to grasp above my reach. It is the following:

I suck at puzzles and I love puzzle-games.

I had previously banged my head against the front door of Christminster University. I gave up each time. This time I gave in to temptation and sinned. I consulted a walkthrough. And I have no remorse.

I loved this game. The puzzles after that fiendish first one were milder to me (I cheated a few times more though), and stubborn exploring got me further and further in the game, and also in the story.

The progression of the story is great. You get the chance to get to know your character and one NPC in particular, a marvellous professor with whom you get to spend a good amount of time. The clock on the tower announces your progression through the puzzles as you get nearer to the endgame. That detail works as a brilliant way to heighten the tension, it lets you know each time you've gotten closer to... what?

The puzzles are hard, but the reward you get is great. You can explore more and more hidden parts of the old building, and the atmosphere is gripping.

A really really good game.

(Well, it actually plays out as much around the city as in it, but I have my reasons...)

First things first: It has a cannon! -Hmm?.. Yes, I'll wait...

Now, Risorgimento Represso is a very good puzzler. Because the main puzzles center around the same theme, completing the first (silly) task before you is one big trial run to prepare you for what's to come. It gets you comfortable with the feel and humorous tone of the game. It also teaches you what details to look for and trains you in the specific puzzle-solving mindset you need for the game.

All the puzzles are well thought-out and in-game logical; on top of that, you might pop an eyeball or two laughing while solving them.

Storywise, Risorgimento makes fantastic use of the Wizard's Apprentice-trope. The whole concept gets the player and the PC on a shared learning curve, facing the same obstacles, and scratching their heads at the same times. I found this really heightened my involvement with my character and with the story.

There's a great build-up of tension, from playful exploration and experimentation to seriously hard thinking about how to save your Master. That's a good learning curve ànd a good immersion curve for you!

So, go shoot that cannon, those of you who haven't done so already; and don't smell the paint thinner, it's bad for you.

First off, some tech-stuff: This game is, hands-down, the most deeply implemented piece of Interactive Fiction I have ever played or heard of. Along with that, it also provides an amazing freedom of experimentation. This is no sandbox, this is dune after dune.

The puzzles are,partly because of the aforementioned freedom, not hard. They are sensible and great fun. Choose your own logical approach and try it. Many different solutions will work, and those that don't will not work for a reason. Very rewarding.

The story is very much for the player to fill in. Lady Short gives you the backbone elements of a story of personal growth and inner realization, up to you to interpret it. The many different endings also give you many possible interpretations.

The writing is crisp and clear, giving Metamorphoses that dreamlike quality. The descriptions are detailed enough to be practical, without excess decoration. Exactly because of the sparse descriptions, the imagination has ample room to dream up it's own version of your surroundings.

Maybe the biggest puzzle here is the quest for completeness.A reverse read-the-author's-mind problem. When playing (and replaying) ask yourself, "What has Emily Short NOT thought of?"

Very, very good game.

When browsing recommended lists and best of lists, Suveh Nux springs up frequently, so I decided to play it.

I can only agree with other reviewers that this is an excellent puzzle-game. Everything works, there's more than one "Aha!"-moment, and there are almost limitless possibilities to experiment, combine stuff and spells and stand in wonder at the results of the latest whim you acted upon.

I loved the brain excercise of solving the logic/language puzzle. The game is a great cerebral A-implies-B problemsolving excercise, with a very big sandbox.

Personally, I like a bit more involvement, the feeling that there's something bigger at stake, but that's just me.