Stone Cell

Baf's Guide

A mess, but an interesting and original mess. You're a peasant girl in a medieval village, tossed in jail for showing up at church improperly attired, and the plot goes in various strange and unpredictable directions from there. The writing varies between competent and ludicrously overdone--melodrama and cliches are prevalent--and there are several peculiar game design decisions, notably the decision to split your cell into a 3x3 grid and hide many of its salient features from you. On the other hand, the whole thing is thoroughly done--you can ask various NPCs about numerous topics, virtually every bit of scenery is implemented--and on the whole it seems like this would have been quite good with some cleanup work.

-- Duncan Stevens

SPAG
The game fairly drips with information: virtually no scenery is left unimplemented, for one thing, and there are lots of doors that you simply cannot get through. The effect is that the game's world seems much larger than it is--you have the sense that you have seen only a small portion of it by the end of the game--which is certainly a nice touch. Unfortunately, the masses of detail available mean that it's easy to fail to discover something important, or to lose an important name in the shuffle--and even at the end of the game, I could not discern how I should have learned a few key bits of information.
-- Duncan Stevens
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SynTax
Written using Tads, Stone Cell is well coded with good use of grammar and elaborate descriptions that err on the side of overwritten. While geographically quite small SC is comprehensively detailed, with much extraneous scenery implemented, which goes a long way toward successfully creating a feeling of a world in which the game takes place. Unfortunately it would appear that more work went into the game descriptions than into the storyline as I found much of the plot implausible and a few of the puzzles a little tenuous to say the least. Hindsight plays a large part in the puzzle solving process as many of the problems weren't only poorly clued but involve the sort of task which you have to get wrong before you even know that it's a puzzle.
-- Nick Edmunds
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>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction

Think about the things you might do if you were trapped in a dungeon. Perhaps you'd listen at the door? Smell your straw mat? Feel along the walls, hoping to find a secret passage? If you did find a crack, might you try to pry it with something? I think so. Yet "listen", "smell", "feel", and "pry" are all unimplemented, along with a host of other verbs that ought to be there. Authors, take note: if you plan to trap your players in an enclosed space, and make a puzzle out of how they are to get out, the puzzle won't be much fun unless that space is very well implemented. The more often a player tries logical things that aren't accounted for in the parser, the surer that player will feel that the solution is simply arbitrary... Unhappily, this sort of thing is exactly what Stone Cell lacks, and the lack degrades it from a great game to merely an interesting experiment in IF techniques. The experiment does teach us something, but the flaws that surround it teach us even more, and the learning process isn't as much fun.
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