The Owl Consults

I enjoyed this 2017 IFComp game. You play as a consultant for super villains who answers their questions for money. The parser becomes a phone line, of which you have 2, and your commands are commands to the villains themselves.

Each villain has unique powers. The writing for the radioactive man grated on me a bit, but overall I found it clever. This game had the most traditional gameplay of the top games of the competition, with no limited parser commands.

I recommend it, and hope that everyone reading this will take the time to try it.

Forgive me, it has been several months between playing this game and writing this review so I can't remember all the details, but what has stuck with me is that I didn't care for it much. The fact that (Spoiler - click to show)the game starts in one place and then you never go back there, and instead are playing somewhere completely different threw me for a loop. I didn't think that the puzzles were set up well (I had to cheat several times and when I found out the answer to several problems I knew that I was unlikely to have ever figured those out on my own because they didn't really make sense). I also think that some of the characters' abilities should have worked in ways that the game didn't allow only because that wasn't the right answer. My favorite part was the ability to switch between phone lines to control the different characters. Clever and decent effort in the classic style, but in the end just not for me.

You are a consultant to super-villains, guiding them step-by-step over the phone. You have two lines, and can switch between the two characters at will. This is all very original, very clever stuff, a great setup, with fun writing. Unfortunately, the game is marred by implementation difficulties: levers that should be off being described as "on", buttons that should be switch on being described as "off". Which makes actually playing and solving the puzzles very difficult. Even if that was fixed, it would still be far too hard. Looking at the hint system reveals jumps in logic that no reasonable player could guess. I wanted to like this one, but it threw too many hurdles in my way. Disappointing.