According to Cain

As someone new to IF, I am both enamored and underwhelmed by According to Cain. The concept kept me continuously engaged and each new story beat built my excitement about solving the mystery, but this is also what led to me being a bit let down by the ending. The payoff for my hard work feels shallow compared to what was built up. There are tantalizing details planted early in the narrative, but not fleshed out enough for me to feel satisfied by their resolution; it seems (Spoiler - click to show)the crow was just a crow all along. It feels like I've spent hours toiling away at the promise of a mind-blowing revelation, only to arrive at "yup, you did it, the end." Put another way, everything feels like it's received the same treatment - nothing stands out more than anything else, which devastates any weight the final moments of the story could have had. At the very least, I am satisfied with my decision to (Spoiler - click to show)not take the orbis from the corpse, which feels thematically appropriate. If the ending were developed with more detail, perhaps it would leave a stronger emotional impact.

Where the ending falls flat, the game design is great for IF amateurs: the introduction perfectly establishes the alchemy system and tools at my disposal so that I looked forward to using my newfound knowledge. Puzzles are intuitive and hints are gracious and well-blended with the narrative (with a few exceptions); I only rarely felt like I didn't know what to do next. Oddly, while I did need to clarify some word definitions (there's got to be another synonym for "pulverulent"), the descriptions in other parts were too vague to give me a clear picture of the world. Generally, I think that's where According to Cain's strengths and weaknesses lie: well-designed, well-paced game elements embedded in a tantalizing, if under-delivering, narrative.

I have to leave it at this: I liked it enough to have wanted more from it. And that, I mean as a compliment.