Muse: An Autumn Romance

SPAG

In virtually all respects, it's a thorough, well-thought-out, effective story. The inherent limitations of IF puzzles put a crimp in the NPC interaction and make you less a character than a player pushing through to the end of the story, which is unfortunate because you really do inhabit much of the story as a character.
-- Duncan Stevens a.k.a. Second April
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SPAG
The Calliope effect
I'm used to getting frustrated struggling with the parser; in Muse, I found myself in a similar struggle, not with the parser, but with Victorian protocol. That seemed to me to be an evocative association: I wondered how not being able to act naturally even to the extent we can today, having to fit everything you did or said into the strict bounds of a rigid code of propriety, resembled struggling with a sort of "parser" every waking moment of your life.
-- Adam Cadre
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SPAG
The game is written in the first-person past tense - a risky decision, but in this case it is extremely effective. The emotions 'felt' by the central character would simply not work in the traditional second-person perspective. It also makes the considerable restrictions placed on your actions seem natural and convincing.
-- Brian Blackwell
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>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction

Muse is the most gorgeously written piece of IF in the competition -- I've still got several games left to play, but I would be very surprised if any of them even equaled Muse's marvelous skill with words, let alone surpassed it. The game is like the IF version of a Merchant-Ivory movie: quiet setting, stellar production values, highly character-oriented, and deeply, deeply felt. It's been a long time since I've been as moved by a piece of IF as I was by the "optimal" ending of Muse -- even some of the less satisfying endings are crafted so well that in themselves they can be quite emotional.
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