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Review
I'm not sure how playable/enjoyable this game is (or would be) without a lot of familiarity with other games in Veeder's Lephrea series, and with his Little Match Girl series.
Like other games in the Lephrea series, you have to travel from room to room examining your Ouija board, which provides word puzzles. If you're not into that, you're not going to like this game.
In a previous game in the series, Stooping to Diplomacy, the board provided cryptic crossword clues, and included a hint system to help you along. This game provides no hints, (Go Hunting had no hints either), and uses a different system.
In this game, many rooms provide input that you're meant to translate according to numbered rules. Eventually you stumble across a room that provides multiple examples for a given rule. Once you solve those, you've learned how that rule works, so you can use that rule in other rooms that call for it, revealing hidden exits, allowing you to progress further and further.
That's fine, in as far as it goes, but by the end it gets quite tedious to apply the rules. (The last Big Boss input is 45 characters long and requires applying 10 different rules a total of 12 times.)
In my opinion, the fun part of Veeder games are the characters with interesting voices. But there are very few characters you can interact with in this game; Lephrea's voice is mostly annoyed to be here, which provides limited opportunities for hijinx.
There's a ghoul guy in this game, and I wish there had been a lot more guys like him, NPCs as obstacles rather than hidden exits.
And, the ending was disappointing, IMO.
(Spoiler - click to show)The ending is kind of a cliffhanger, in the sense that you unavoidably die at the end of this game, but on the podcast, Veeder revealed that there would be a next game for Lephrea, set in the afterlife or something. That's kinda interesting, but as an ending for this game, it doesn't feel surprisingly inevitable in hindsight; it feels like a disappointing womp womp of an ending. You never even really find anything out! Why is Scrooge hunting you at all? Why did Scrooge say she wanted the Ouija board? Does old Scrooge even know that young Scrooge will have killed you?
I wish the ending had answered some questions, rather than just raising questions to be answered in another game.
