Ratings and Reviews by SarahTheEntwife

This is a surreal, funny little one-room game. You are a doctoral student having trouble concentrating on your dissertation. Your girlfriend has threatened to break up with you and move back to Australia if you do not write 1000 words by the end of the day. She narrates the entire game -- for example, if you "get" something, she quips "Yours, plucky wombat!" or whatever nickname she picks that time. There are quite a lot of amusing easter eggs to discover.

Violet's sense of humor is...sardonic to say the least. I would not want her as my girlfriend, but as a character, she's hilarious and the relationship is very believable. The puzzles, with one exception that I found frustratingly non-intuitive, are fun and just challenging enough to be interesting. There's often this marvelous sense of "Oh, I can't possibly be supposed to do that, can I?" Yes, whatever action you were contemplating with looming dread is exactly what you are supposed to do. The plot skirts the line between tragic and comedic, but stays on the "comedic" side, at least for me. However, I wouldn't recommend playing this while getting over a bad breakup unless you have a rather dark sense of humor ;-)

This is just...gorgeous. The writing is incredible -- your fantastical solar-sail ship feels familiar, while the places you sail to evoke that thrill of wonder and alienness even though to the player, everything should be equally strange. Playwise, it's a bit of a "hoist sails and find out what happens" interface rather than letting you affect the plot much, but that works perfectly with the premise: you're an explorer just seeing what's out there. This is a game to play for the storytelling rather than the challenge. The puzzles are clever but not particularly difficult and the parser will accept both a wide variety of authentic nautical terms and more landlubber-friendly versions. If you sail, this will be particularly enjoyable, but if you don't you won't be lost at all.

It's mostly a story of pure exploration, but the ending is crisply wistful and satisfying. It has a bit of a Ray Bradbury feel to it -- the nostalgic stories, not the creepy ones.

The only problem I had was that in one situation, I tried multiple ways to get out of a trap, only to find myself suddenly free without doing anything different that I could see. I'm not sure if that was a bug or me doing something slightly different without realizing.