Reviews by E.K.

You play Elliott, a harried farmhand at Granny Grabby's farm. Her prized duck Mabel has swallowed the engagement ring you intended to surprise your girlfriend with this evening - you must get it back! With the help of your favourite pig Bessie, you will embark on an enjoyable load of puzzles and fetch-quests, that range from the simple to the slightly obtuse, but all full of this light, quirky humour.

The lightness does perhaps disguise that it is possible to put yourself in an unwinnable position without the game immediately telling you. However, these occasions seem rare, and with careful reading you should be able to avoid this (if the narrative voice seems iffy about your action, consider its necessity before continuing on). The inventory system is also rather inefficient - while the game will automatically shift items into a container when your hands are full, it then ceases to recognise you as 'having' these items, and you will have to take them again before attempting to use them. This is a minor quibble, however, and doesn't really get in the way of the fun.

In all, this is a great little comic puzzler, full of the joys of spring (and things).

In Dead Reckoning, you are Mark Duffy, returned to the village of Morrow to help your friend Edwin, who has been babbling about mysterious dangers. Initially sceptical, you soon find out that they are very real.

While I'm not sure that Dead Reckoning qualifies as cruel on the Zarfian scale, there are certainly multiple ways to bring death upon yourself here. Judicious use of save and undo will help you, and the game in some ways actually encourages you to try death-bringing moves to gather knowledge needed to better understand your aims and how to achieve them.

The writing is mostly pretty tight, and it's a well put-together world, but there are flaws. In one area, you must examine something, and then examine a further element of that description in order to find an object (Spoiler - click to show)(although I don't believe this object is essential to finding the best ending). In other areas, however, there are descriptions of objects that seem important, and yet are not implemented in the game-world.

I uncovered two small incidents of guess-the-verb, though only one I found infuriating:

1) (Spoiler - click to show)When trying to get into Edwin's house, you must make yourself known to him lest he attacks you. Yet when you try this, the parser demands a very precise wording:

> call
Command not understood. Try something else.

> shout
You’re a little reluctant to do that.

> call to edwin
“Edwin! It’s me!"

2) (Spoiler - click to show)And later, when trying to discuss topics with the priest:
> ask kadrin about shekel
Kadrin frowns. “I fear I do not understand what you are referring to.”

> talk to kadrin
“What do you wish to know?” asks Kadrin.

1: “Tell me about Shekel.”

Other than these few irritants, Dead Reckoning is an enjoyable horror with a tint of mystery, and for fans of the genre it is well worth a play-through or two (or more, if you're also a fan of dying, a lot).

A thoughtful and thought-provoking meditation on gender identities, identification and presentation. This is not a 'game', per se, nor really interactive, but more a hypertextual expression, and a very well-written one. The middling score given here reflects only on its linearity and short length, and I'd very much like to see more from this author.

A neat little meta-fictional game about the trials and tribulations of IF writer's block, featuring a guest appearance from the muse of epic poetry (hence the tortured pun in my review title). It's nicely packaged for a short game, and relatively well-paced, but suffers from a crucial guess-the-verb problem at the last moment.

(Spoiler - click to show)I tried 'writing' the game, I tried 'typing' the game, I even tried 'playing' the game, but didn't think to 'make' it or 'put' it until I'd banged my head against the wall too many times. A fault of my own imagination, perhaps, but a more modern version should certainly have circumvented this difficulty.

"Assuming you haven’t lost your grip on reality, you are Isaiah Knott, a twenty-seven year old man from the Appalachian mountains". The question is, have you lost your grip on reality? Your partner thinks you have, and the whole town is sure your dad was crazy. And it's all down to those darn UFOs.

Alien Abduction? is not a huge game - one good Mastermind-like puzzle, some mechanical manipulation and a little lateral thinking will get you through. But the characterisation of you-as-Isaiah is very strong, the mystery and ambiguity are both compelling, and the NPCs are amusing, if not perhaps as interesting as your own motivations.

It's a game that could have been truly great given a little more implementation. There were way too many stock responses that inevitably become annoying for the diligent IF player. For me, if something is important enough to be described in scene-setting, it should be important enough to be at least recognised by the parser. I get very tired of exchanges such as this:

You are wearing your comfortable jeans, a thick flannel shirt, and hiking boots.
>x jeans
I don’t know the word “jeans”.

Still, I think its age means that Alien Abduction can be forgiven somewhat for this, and its conversation system is a little more fleshed out, in that it can deal with concepts as well as objects (though you still can't ask anyone about "UFOs", unfortunately).

Ingold's storytelling here weaves a magical world and an emotive story, with something of a twist. The central innovation here is that it is written in the style of a novel, with the player's inputs remaining outside of the first-person text. The slightly expressionist style gives a good sense of character, and we can feel strongly the protagonist's love for his partner, and their inner motivations and desires. However, the actual backstory felt somewhat muddled, and by the time the twist came it did not have the impact a more clear narrative might have.

Despite the fact that the author implemented multiple solutions to certain puzzles, and side puzzles that one need not complete, I also felt that I was mostly following a story on rails. The majority of the action proceeds via simply thinking about things, or even by typing 'look'. It did not really matter whether I puzzle-solved or not, and the few essential puzzles felt too simple to get past. Obviously, interactive fiction does not rely on puzzles, but it does rely on some sense of interactivity, and I felt this was somewhat weak - what I chose did not have any impact on what happened, particularly.

There was also one small niggle I had regarding the inventory system - although my inventory was never overly full nor even that important, I found it rather annoying to have to check my satchel separately from my general inventory.

Overall: great atmosphere, strong writing, excellent sense of romance, but narrative and gameplay were ultimately not as satisfying as they should have been.

As soon as I'm given the basic premise of Leadlight I feel at home. I'm a teenage girl at a spooky ballet school? This must be Dario Argento's Suspiria. While it is not, in fact, a recreation of Argento's masterpiece, this familiar setting is enough to be content that we're in for a gore-splattered ride, and Clarke does not disappoint.

There are several instant-death spots, which will cost you final points to undo, so it is wise to save often - these, however, are good for adding the suspense factor that horror films do so well: if I hear a noise and proceed, will it be turn out to be innocent or will it be certain doom? The writing is mostly functional, rather than particularly pretty, but it keeps one going, and I never felt stuck for motivation. The back-story is also intriguing, if very much in the canonical horror style, and including a system of scoring for secrets found was a good impetus to continue poking around.

My main gripes were with the retro-parser: small niggles such as having to type 'examine' instead of 'x', for instance, and some instructions were slightly less intuitive than modern parsers allow for. Implementation was generally decent, however. I also found it somewhat jarring that while using a retro platform and old-school parser, Clarke lays out a world with iPods and iMacs - it would have been more fitting to place the action in the 1980s or before.

Unfortunately, I got stuck (Spoiler - click to show)going into the leadlight door, where every action I tried got me killed. However, the time spent playing before running into this wall was most enjoyable, and the game deserves a strong score for its fun factor.

While the gameplay concept for this game is admirable - the ability to modify communication with NPCs through multiple verbs and adverbs - the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. Experimental games tend to make me want to experiment, yet I would all too often be stuck in a rut of trying out different modes of speech with no success.

The prose is vivid and enjoyable, and the characters enjoyably drawn. The game is certainly worth a play-through despite its flaws.