Jigsaw

I remember getting a very intimidating book as a present when I was a small child. I was amazed that it had more than a thousand pages. It seemed impossible that anyone would get through such a huge story. It turned out to be a "365 Bedtime Fairytales"-book, with a 3-page story for each night.

What was a relief in the case of the bedtime book turned out to be a disappointment in the case of Jigsaw, a game I had been looking forward to playing for a long time.

Instead of a sweeping epic story taking me past the turning points of recent history, I got 16 smallish (but hard) bedtime puzzles barely held together by an overarching plot. Just as with the bedtime-book, Jigsaw took a long time to finish. I would hardly call it a big game though. More a series of historical vignettes, to be experienced and enjoyed at the player's leisure.

As for the overarching plot, anyone's guess is as good as mine. Here's what I made of it: Black has a plan to change the past to mold the present and/or future to Black's priorities/preferences. You don't want that. (Even if some of the changes Black tries to make are really good ideas, like (Spoiler - click to show)preventing World War I...) Your task is to find and reverse the temporal disturbances Black leaves in his wake as he visits certain important times in the 20th century. Black's and your motives for all of this remain in the dark (to me, at least).

After a confusing introductory sequence (where you need to find an unmentioned exit to progress, not for the only time in this game...), you arrive in the central hub/control centre. From here you can access the different time-areas where you need to solve a puzzle.

Fortunately, the time-areas are mostly independent from each other. As you enter one, you should be able to find everything needed to fix the temporal disturbance. This makes the puzzles merely hard, instead of impossible. Allthough the number of rooms and available objects is limited in every area, you have to time your actions carefully and execute them in a particular order. SAVE and RESTORE are necessary parts of the gameplay.

Most of the historical vignettes were very enjoyable, clearly well-researched and very satisfying to solve. Some were either too hard, or were solvable but took me far into try-everything-on-everything terrain.

I missed a cohesive backstory tying this game together as a whole. However, it's well worth exploring and trying to solve the puzzles independently. As I said: very satisfying.

It is New Year's Eve, 1999, and a mysterious stranger drops you a piece of a seemingly ordinary jigsaw. But each piece turns out to be a gateway to a different event in the twentieth century. Can you make history?

I came to this game fresh from Nelson's wonderful game *Curses!*, looking for something similar. It simultaneously is and isn't. Like that of *Curses!*, *Jigsaw*'s a nicely large game world, which allows you to jump in and out of different times and different places. Each jigsaw piece is a mystery: where are you going to go next? The overall tone is considerably different to that of the earlier game: it is much more sombre, dealing with the tragedies and crises of the twentieth century. There is, however, a romance, and there are a few moments of humour(Spoiler - click to show), such as when you rearrange the deckchairs on the Titanic.

Each jigsaw piece is a relatively self-contained mini-game: actions taken in one chapter rarely have an impact on others. This may or may not appeal: I enjoyed the sprawling, ever-growing environment of *Curses!*, where an object found in one place might open up another area of the game; but it helped to be able to concentrate the mind on a small area, containing one or two puzzles. Some of the chapters were over quickly, with just one or two actions to complete; many puzzles were difficult, and I am grateful for Bonni Mierzejewska's walkthrough. Examine everything, look under things, and talk to characters.

Each chapter clearly has a great deal of historical research behind it (and there are footnotes to each one in the Help menu), so it's a game that is both informative and entertaining.