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Review
This is a compact puzzle game. You are a young keeper of time, and the time crystals have been stolen, opening up portals to famous disasters.
Disasters include a lot of conflagarations, like Krakatoa, Hindenburg, and the London Fire, balanced by the icy Titanic sinking and mediated by the San Francisco earthquake.
Some subareas are small, with most being 3-4 rooms and a couple being significantly larger.
Puzzle solution generally revolves around finding an item in one area that allows progress another, so basically like a key-door structure (with three of the items being actual keys, although none get used for doors).
The game is decidedly puzzle-oriented. Time travel is ripe for philosophical quandaries, questions of ethics, unrequited hopes, resignation, ontological paradoxes, butterfly effect, etc. Here, the author has neatly sidestepped all of this, avoiding any deep contemplation about time travel. Time resets every time you leave and enter an area, but only the watch time; all things you did remain in effect and all NPCs remember what you told them. Trying to warn individuals about disasters has no effect or reaction.
The lack of implicit actions in PunyInform is frustrating. A lot of gameplay was like:
>GO [location in water]
You can't do that while holding things.
(oh right, I'm holding a key).
>PUT KEY IN [container]
I splash around a bit and get somewhere. Now I need the key.
>UNLOCK DOOR WITH KEY.
You're not holding the Key.
>GET KEY. UNLOCK DOOR.
The door is unlocked.
> ENTER DOOR.
The door is not open.
>OPEN DOOR. ENTER DOOR.
I do what I need to. Time to leave into the water.
'You can't do that while holding items'.
That's a vague excerpt, but some implicit actions for going through closed doors and using items that are in a carried container would be nice. Similarly, X SIGN and READ SIGN are different, which could be interesting, but almost all the descriptions for X-ing things with writing just say 'This is a readable thing. It would be neat to read it', so I wonder if it would be easier to just assume the player wants to READ it whenever they X it. It would be very difficult to examine a sign in real life without reading it, since most of a sign is words.
I did softlock myself once by getting really far into an area and not being able to return to the portal in time, so I recommend saving.
