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Review
First off: I'm probably not going to add anything new to the reviews already in here. I'll be highlighting the effective writing, the wonderful moodsetting, and I'll explain where I got terminally stuck - and why; why the interactions up to that point, and especially the parser responses I had encountered, which had taught me that a crucial command would not be worth thinking about.
So feel free to skip this review, although I always think it's important when a player explains why they got stuck in a puzzle.
First, I must acknowledge the best about the game: the writing, though sparse, is, as we've come to expect from Plotkin, amazingly effective. He doesn't need to drown us in rivers of prose (which is what I usually do); he tells us things as they are. The words he chooses, his vocabulary, the things he focuses on - that is where his art lies, and with only a few brushstrokes he paints compelling settings. In the game's second act, I can feel the cold and wet rain falling on me, I can feel the urgency of the situation, it is all extremely vivid.
This is accompanied by well-known technical excellence that needs no introduction. I will merely highlight the "moment of light", and how it reflects in the descriptions of most rooms. Not to mention the importance of such a final magical moment before things gradually start taking a turn for the worse. Yes, his prowess at world-setting and wordsmithing extends to pacing.
Ok, let's talk about the crux of the game. When I played it, the game was very clear to me that it is cruel in the Zarfian scale, and how is earns that rating. So I knew what to expect, and I kept savegames, and I really intended to finish this one by myself. I wanted to have faith in this puzzler, tackle it by its own terms, see what makes it tick, and solve it.
HAH!
BWAHAHAHAHAHA!
What a laugh, hey? I mean, how naïve can you be?
Naturally, I failed. But I want to explain why, in hopes that this information is useful to designers.
I was failing in the second act, and I don't think it's possible to avoid spoilers from this point on, so... I'll use multiple spoiler tags because it seems the spoiler tag doesn't like paragraphs.
(Spoiler - click to show)I was really trying hard to figure out how to block the water with the sandbags. Managing the lightsources. Managing the timer. I had the topography in my mind. I realised I could have no time to take both bags to the Wildflowers. I looked for alternative paths. I checked to see if the key "unrusted" before going to sleep, when it started raining. Since "pushing" the boulder sent it down a bad path, I tried "pulling" it (same result). I had tried to "throw dirty bag west" to get them out of the shed, and indeed "roll it out" and "push it west" (to which the game infuriatingly says, "Is that the best you can think of?", the default message I hate the most, and so I forget about the idea of pushing anything in any direction)". I was looking for alternate paths that would make me get places quicker. I was trying putting both bags on the blanket to then pull the blanket, and no, I don't know how I would have gotten that over the branch, I just had to try something! (Spoiler - click to show)...if you know the game, you'll realise that, in my previous paragraph I stumbled upon something critical. But the game pointed me away from it, with its replies. (Spoiler - click to show)"Push boulder s". (Spoiler - click to show)Now, I'd stumbled upon this concept when I tried to "pull boulder" to see what happened. It makes sense, because "pull"ing it would theoretically send it down a different path. What happened is that I got exactly the same reply as though I had "pushed" the boulder, so I thought that whatever happened the boulder would always roll towards the same direction, regardless of how I attempted to influence it. (Spoiler - click to show)Furthermore, my various attempts at getting the bags out of the shed, as I said, included a default message for trying to push them west. Seeing that, my mind clearly associated that pushing things in directions would be pointless. If there was a default message here, where it made sense (and it understood "throw dirty w" as being "drop dirty", which is SO annoying), then clearly I should forget about that possibility and look elsewhere.Cue the walkthrough. And in a game like this, once you hit the walkthrough, you can't go back. In fact, I find that's true for every game I play, and that's why I avoid hints and walkthroughs: once I start, I have a very hard time going back to thinking by myself, normally because all the time I put in has proved useless; worthless. I have no motivation to try and think my way around any more puzzles.
The exception is when I look at the solution and I go, "huh. I actually could have gotten that."
NOT the case here.
So, this game is beautiful, and intricate, and excellent, until it makes you give up. From that point on, if you enjoy playing games from a walkthrough, you may enjoy this. I don't.
I hope this feedback is useful to authors.
