Caffeination

SPAG

Okay, there are a lot of problems with this game, but I'm going to try to be constructive about it. This is a game where the author is having an enormously good time and the player is having no fun at all. That's a heck of a problem, and it's a sad one to have to point out to someone who's got a big cheesy grin on his face. This author went wrong somewhere along the line, and had no clue he was creating a total misfire, even has he continued to pack in numerous contrivances and clever details and elaborate red herrings and locations and multiple puzzles with multiple solutions.
-- J. Robinson Wheeler
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>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction

This may be a problem that deserves its own category: the "walkthrough-driven game". These games end up making me feel like one of the time travelers in Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder," terrified to step off the path lest everything around me be screwed up forever. That's certainly what happens with Caffeination. Especially after the first puzzle, I found myself confronted with one bug after another when I tried things that the game didn't expect.

Now, like the bugs in Sophie's Adventure, many of this game's bugs were beneficial to me, including one that allowed me to win without solving any of the coffee shop puzzles at all... Still, winning lacks its usual pleasure when it's done by exploiting a bug. I was happy enough to have the game overwith, but I wish it could have been different.