Golden Shadow

The Golden Shadow provides a faintly interesting premise: a gilded room and a man that cannot remove his top hat. Throw in a darkly enchanting poem and you have several elements that could result in a taut and eerie game. However, that's not what the Golden Shadow is. Instead, the Golden Shadow is another frustrating excursion into the land of one-roomed-ness. After not being able to examine anything -- even after turning off the lamp -- I resorted to the walkthrough. The very first line involves a vague verb that years of IF schooling have taught me never to use. Given that I would have never resorted to that verb, and that the game told me to do something which it then told me was impossible, I just gave up.

Given that this is the first outing by the author, the problems here derive from simply not knowing or a lack of time instead of a desire to maul the audience. There's a few things that could be done to improve the game -- a couple rounds of copyediting and more clueing, for instance. It's a shame to waste a good setup, so I do hope that the author returns to this game and polishes it up a bit.

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