Miss Gosling's Last Case

I went into reviewing Miss Gosling’s Last Case by Daniel M. Stelzer with a certain amount of trepidation. I had picked this game as my re-introduction to the world of IF after a break of over 35 years. Would this game be as good as my memories from the golden era of interactive fiction in the 1980s? Well, the short answer is that I loved this game but in the interest of a more meaningful review I should probably elaborate.

The idea to have the spiritual link between owner and pet dog as driving the gameplay mechanic was inspired. Here, the (deceased) owner is relegated to being the narrator and all actions are performed by the canine companion. This puts an interesting twist on puzzle solving and there are a number of ingenious puzzles in this game with objects that are extremely well implemented, e.g. the dumbwaiter.

The narrative writing was excellent with pitch perfect asides from Miss Gosling that really brought the game world to life. The overall quality of both story and puzzles was reminiscent of Infocom at it’s best and I can easily imagine this as one of the grey box releases with the in-game map and newspaper article cuttings as the “feelies” that might be included.

The puzzles were challenging enough to require some offline thought but none were so difficult that I needed to rely on the in-built help system. In fact, a number of the more challenging puzzles had multiple “wrong” actions that provided subtle hints to the correct solution.

There were two minor aspects to the story that I didn’t like.

• At one point our canine hero is forced to make a death-defying leap onto the corpse of his former owner. I fear that this will lead to prolonged nightmares for Watson and require some significant doggy therapy to get over. As this effectively happens in the second act I wonder whether it would be less jarring (at the risk of a slightly harder landing) to the have the corpse removed in between acts one and two.

• The police officers appear to have gone to the Dick van Dyke school of regional accents as a number of the lines they speak seem particularly inauthentic and they seem more caricature than in-character.

Overall, I really enjoyed this game and would happily play a follow-up adventure. For me, this has shown that the IF renaissance is alive and well and I look forward to exploring other works by Daniel M. Stelzer. Dare I say it, perhaps now is the true golden era of interactive fiction…