Clusterflux

MTW tends to make games that have similar strengths and similar weaknesses.

Pros:
-Large casts of interesting characters that talk to you and follow you around
-Big maps and inventories
-Compelling plot points and settings

Cons:
-Only one path is implemented
-Difficult to predict correct paths
-Typos and bugs

This game is no exception. A mysterious mongoose/cat and a mysterious woman come into your life, and you investigate a weird house with links to the past.

I used the walkthrough because, from experience, it's difficult to play a MTW game without one.

Edit: For some more specific feedback on this game:

(Spoiler - click to show)Consider the following exchange when meeting the first human NPC:
>talk to woman
That's not a verb I recognise.

>ask woman about woman
sleeping young woman doesn't have anything useful to say about that.

This is a game filled with NPCs. It takes only 5 minutes to put in a response to TALK TO WOMAN that suggests using ASK/TELL instead. The capitalization and/or article usage for "sleeping young woman" is harder but is doable.

The default responses for many simple verbs like JUMP, PUSH, and EAT have all been left in.

Error messages make up the bulk of text you see when playing a parser game, and they need a lot of work here.

Clusterflux is truly an ambitious project, and a much larger game than initial appearances would suggest. It’s actually impressively huge, especially considering it’s a one-author game. Described as a “weird mystery”, it’s also right up my alley, and I enjoyed it immensely. It did, however, take me six hours to get through it and had to consult the walkthrough twice. I think it would be hard for most to finish in under two hours, though the first two hours were just as enjoyable as the rest. Well, perhaps apart from the half-hour I spent banging my head against a specific puzzle.

In general terms, I would like to describe Clusterflux as a modern self-conscious style puzzle IF, where an everyday protagonist enters absurdity as if it were the most natural thing in the world – not too dissimilar to Bill Lindsay’s excellent Bullhockey games.

While the plot is more than sold enough, and its absurdity intriguing, the puzzles are what makes this a great game. They are always clever, but generally not too clever, and solving them provides proper satisfaction. I was planning to stop after two hours, but this is the kind of game I can’t put down until I have finished it.

With a game as big and ambitious as Clusterflux, there will likely be several small bugs persevering even rigorous beta-testing and I did meet a few of these. Still, it is impressive how polished it is, with thorough descriptions for almost everything. The large gallery of autonomous NPCs made certain scenes a bit confusing, but useful conversations are limited by a topic list which made it manageable.

A tremendous amount of work has gone into this game and I’m immensely grateful for it.