Ratings and Reviews by Tom Hudson

This game seems to promise lots of worldbuilding, and playing it I get the impression that the world was built but only some of the background was implemented. The depth of detailing is really uneven; that which is there is so good that I resent not having the rest that I'm led to expect. I didn't find any bugs, and the puzzles were mostly straightforward, but one requires using found objects the way they're "meant to be used" not having any clue what the result will be, and a second, critical puzzle required some out-of-the-box thinking that is strongly miscued. (If you try a certain action in the first context you can, it has one result. Trying that same action in other contexts has no result, and no hints of partial success, but there's a variant on that action that is necessary to proceed.)

Moderately fun, but not satisfying.

Plot, atmosphere, and worldbuilding are all excellent in this Emily Short piece. I found it refreshingly easy - and in hindsight there seem to be two solutions to many of the puzzles - which let me could concentrate on exploration. Despite taking lots of time to explore, I didn't think it was as long as some other reviewers report - a bit more than competition length, perhaps, but not an epic. I found two puzzles undercued or miscued, one of which left me stuck enough to go to Usenet for an answer. (The other puzzle I didn't solve, and just accepted a sub-optimal ending.) Unfortunately, there's also enough time pressure on your interactions with the principal NPCs that they don't seem as fully realized as some of Short's previous efforts, the supporting cast don't connect as well as they need to for the penultimate scene to work for me, and the last scene was a rather unconvincing explanation for me, with an apparent total change of genre; there's one hint that I might have missed some explanation of what was going on, but if so it wasn't foregrounded.

Recommended.