Fish!

Someone over at Magnetic Scrolls must have though "Hey, if we can get the players on board with the most ridiculous premise right at the start of our new game, we can do pretty much everything we want to them once they're along for the ride."

So they did.

It's only through the mastery of text adventures that Magnetic Scrolls has that this doesn't dive off the deep end into utter baffling zaniness. Even then, Fish! cuts it really close.

Two things hold it together:

--The skill of balancing puzzles on the brink of logic. Oftentimes, I found myself doing stuff because that's what you do in an adventure. Only afterwards did the results fall into place and did things make sense. I blamed this on lack of clueing or lazy storytelling at first. I have to admit that at least part of the gaps were caused by my frequent use of the walkthrough. When played on its own terms, Fish! sends you back to your fishbowl upon failure (or just plain kills you later in the game). This means that before you solve a given chapter, you will experience it many times in different sequences.
Even then though, some of the jumps, hoops and timeloops the game expected me to not only find but also exploit in the right order were a bit too much of the try-die-repeat variety. ((Spoiler - click to show)How on earth one is to know when to go to the disco?)
At its best however, Fish! offers some long-term puzzles where it is a great pleasure to see the vague goal you saw from afar finally come into focus and click.

-- The skill of letting the story cover any holes. A mystery story with dimension hopping fish is bound to have lots of loose threads. Those are features, not bugs! Now, I don't want to accuse Magnetic Scrolls of doing this on purpose... much. Fish! is an immersive action-mystery. The dimensional loops give it a thought-provoking SF feel. The writers throw in their best goofball-comedy talents. It's really a very entertaining ride.
If a few clues and some plotlines got obfuscated for the sake of fun, oh well...

The PC in Fish! is sent to different areas by means of warps. Each area does not just contain a puzzle, it is a puzzle. You need to find the sequence to get to the proper ending, otherwise you are sent back, killed off, or zombified. Especially after the first three preparatory levels, thing get serious. There are explicit and implicit timers (you were told that you have a meeting at ten, but (Spoiler - click to show)no one said when and why they stopped selling plankton sachets in the restaurant...).

I found this incredibly difficult without the walkthrough, but, as I said, relying on the walkthrough too much will make you miss a lot of the story.

And actually, aside from all the frustration this game will surely cause you, the mystery-goofball-SF story is a big laugh I wouldn't want to have missed.

I"m playing text adventures for almost 30 years, and when I think "adventures" (OK, OK... "I. F." God...) Fish! is number one on my list. I've played and played and played this game over and over, and I still enjoy it on OSX all these years later.

Magnetic Scrolls really managed to capture the mood of the mid/late 1980s and their games are just a joy to read and play again and again.