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Number of Reviews: 13
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2 people found the following review helpful:
The Impossible Bottle is an incredible triumph., December 1, 2020It would be an exaggeration to call The Impossible Bottle a spiritual successor to Trinity, but it wouldn't be much of an exaggeration.
Both works involve the playful exploration of a logically consistent fantasy world, and both of them include Klein bottle references.
Puzzles in The Impossible Bottle are beautifully integrated with its story, consistently blurring the lines between fantasy and reality in ways that weren't possible in Brian Moriarty's 1986 Infocom title. (Moriarty's London tourist obviously departs from the world that we know. It's difficult to say for certain whether Emma of the Impossible Bottle remains in the real world.)
I was concerned that the story of a six-year-old doing housework might be unapproachably childlike, and instead I discovered an entertaining challenge that re-defined conceptual space.
Each puzzle in The Impossible Bottle asks whether you need to change objects so that they can better relate to their environment or change the environment so that it can better relate to the objects.
Despite the constantly shifting perspective, the parser still understood what I was trying to accomplish. It must have required a lot of work to implement smoothly.
I appreciated the tone of this entry's narration. Descriptions were clear and earnest, with the kinds of wry observations you'd expect from someone who doesn't quite understand the tedious social rituals of adulthood. Prompts from the environment gently steered me towards the entry's main mechanic, which was a deceptively simple concept enabling a large number of complex interactions.
4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
A whimsical and truly delightful parser puzzler, December 1, 2020Linus Åkesson, the author of this game, is the creator of the Dialog authoring system and his three games seem to have been made in tandem with its development. Being fundamentally different in terms of both premise, story and interaction, they each play to different strengths of Dialog. This time, the author presents us with a real puzzlefest, and it is as delightful as they come.
Taking on the role as a six year old girl you start the game tidying up your toys, but it soon turns into a clever, whimsical and imaginative journey through your house in order to make everything ready for dinner. Storywise, The Impossible Bottle certainly alludes to Alice’s adventures in wonderland; it is equally surrealistic (though admittedly far less trippy). And like the books about Alice, Åkesson’s story also contains hidden layers of depth that are gradually uncovered during play. Despite a few instances of parser strangeness, the implementation is mostly brilliant, and the writing, though sparse, is perfectly suited to the protagonist and her world.
It took me just over two hours to finish The Impossible Bottle, and I loved every minute of it!
6 of
6 people found the following review helpful:
Amazing concept with near perfect execution, October 23, 2020What initially appears to be a charming slice-of-life about a six year-old girl helping her dad get ready for a dinner party turns into a old-school puzzlefest with an extraordinary mechanic that I'm embarrassed to admit I needed the in-game hints to even discover. For those that don't mind knowing ahead of time, the mechanic is (Spoiler - click to show) that your bedroom has a dollhouse which is a replica of the actual house, and putting items in and taking them out of their respective rooms changes their relative size in reality. For example (not in the game), if you were to put a toy sword in the dollhouse's kitchen, and then go to the actual kitchen, you'd find a regular sized sword.
The coding for this puzzlefest is damn impressive, as there are so many things you can do that aren't required that the game allows you to do, and even some potential alternate solutions to puzzles are at least acknowledged even if unsuccessful.
I badly wanted to give this five stars, but the more I played the game the more I found myself exhausted. Some of the puzzles enhance the charm of this universe and the way your family reacts (or doesn't react) to some of things you do is great. I actually adore the whole sequence with (Spoiler - click to show) the stegosaurus and the way Dad reacts to it. But there are also several puzzles that seem to be there simply for puzzle's sake, (for example the (Spoiler - click to show)rope/anchor puzzle inside the impossible bottle), and I found myself going to the hints quite often just to get a jumpstart on what to do next. There are also so many items you can carry or manipulate and a lot of them are irrelevant to progressing in the game, so I found myself easily getting overwhelmed and resorting to the hints for that reason as well. For their own sake, the progressive hints were really well done and I rarely needed the final hint to progress; I mainly just needed a nudge on where to focus my efforts.
A must play for puzzle enthusiasts and I would be surprised if The Impossible Bottle doesn't win an XYZZY award or three.
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