Ratings and Reviews by Tom Hudson

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.

Although Varicella regularly gets high marks, I've never been able to enjoy it: it's of the "die many times in order to learn what you have to do" genre, you'll die many times not learning anything first because you're in the wrong place at the wrong time, and even knowing what you have to do you'll die many more times figuring out how to execute it correctly. As such, there's too much drudgery here for me to enjoy the play of the game, and the time pressure takes away from my ability to appreciate whatever worldbuilding has been done. To many people's taste, perhaps, but not to mine.