Ratings and Reviews by Tom Hudson

A Zork prequel marked by seemingly-irreversible actions that you discover after the fact are trivial. Most of this strikes me as a high-level design problem, although it's so common it could even be intentional: you are offered many puzzles early on, some of which are insoluble until late in the game - but there's no reason to believe that, and advancing the game is one of those seemingly-irreversible actions that you expect to cut off access to the unsolved puzzles. This problem is confounded by the number of locked scenery objects that are just red herrings - doors and containers abound in room descriptions, and give standard unlocking prompts rather than an assurance that they're outside the scope of the game.

Aside from those red herrings, the implementation is often shallow. Many exits are unmentioned in the room descriptions, not shown on the included map, or both. The room descriptions are brief, but lack the attention to craft that distinguished a lot of the Infocom writing; there are also occasional grammar errors.

Some puzzles are simple, well-cued, and yet feel really clever. Others are from the "read object that tells you what to do; do it". Still others are of the form "make notes and pick up objects at the start of the game so that you can have them in the late game when there's no way to go back for them."

A few pros: Some clever automatic cueing (to supplement the extensive familiar I6 menu-driven help). GUE memorabilia. Large scope (c. 100 rooms). Some of the puzzle design is simple but feels really clever.

My thought: downloading this one is no more irreversible than SPOILER or SPOILER.

You're on vacation at the beach when your mom gets a telegram about a sea monster and runs off to deal with it. This is a SpeedIF, so what ensues is really short, but it's got two twists that worked perfectly for me and that make it more worth playing than most.

The game is let down by the ADRIFT parser and pacing problems at the climax; the horror is a bit forced, and the denouement isn't sufficiently foreshadowed, but it's got the kernel of an interesting story. Nicely non-Lovecraftian.

A large chunk of the game is about running away, which makes a very nice motivation. However, the timing is extremely strict, which means that you learn by dying - again and again and again. Further, it can be quite cruel: if you don't pick up necessary but unobvious objects before you're on the run, you won't have a chance afterwards. A couple of minor bugs contribute to these problems (on one possible route, you can go 'west' into a room, but you can't go 'east' out of it - and trying to do so costs you the one-turn margin of error you have).

So, not to my taste - I think the time pressure could be reduced, or the puzzle solutions more heavily clued, to provide a better game experience. Which is a pity, since the story the author wants to tell looks interesting (albeit, as Paul O'Brian says in his review, with large chunks of setting taken straight from Dungeons & Dragons).

The plot doesn't advance unless you read the "sample transcript" in the poorly-written PDF and learn the (uncued in-game) magic word there. Then you're forced into a conversation, which doesn't advance unless you play lots of guess-the-noun, or, again, read the sample transcript and find the nouns there.

Spelling, grammar, punctuation, and diction errors. Sparse implementation. Backstory through a tome of infodump that is sparsely implemented.

Cruel, uncued, full of typos and poor writing.

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.

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.