Ratings and Reviews by Karl Ove Hufthammer

You’re at a new year’s party, standing near the refreshment table, and people keep coming up to you, asking for pretzels, cherry tomatoes or celery stalks. You can choose to give them what they want – whereby you win – or not – whereby you lose. This is not just a summary of the game; it’s basically the entire gameplay (though a mouse in the egg nog does make things (just) slightly harder). Oh, and one more thing: You’re Hitler. Nazi Mice is not a fun game, but thankfully it’s short. Not recommended.

This game was written for a Speed-IF competition, i.e., in a very limited amount of time, yet manages to have several puzzles and a coherent, if somewhat strange, story. But although the objectives of the puzzles are very clear, their solutions are not. The game usually left me feeling clueless about how to achieve the objectives, and finding the objects (and even locations) needed frequently happened by accident. I was stuck a few times, but found the ClubFloyd transcript very useful.

I played the first part of the original competition release, and then finished the second release of the game. The second release has a few more implemented objects (i.e., ‘examine [object]’ is more likely to give a response), but the game still feels extremely underimplemented, with lots of unimplemented verbs and nouns, and plenty of stock responses (even for ‘examine me’). Both versions have their share of grammar mistakes.

Although this is not a good game, it is not all bad. It does have three real puzzles, which is more than one would expect from a Speed-IF. And the game is quite humorous, with much of the humour coming from the absurdity of the various situations. You will probably find it more entertaining reading a transcript from a successful playthrough than trying to solve the puzzles yourself, though.