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Review
This long puzzler is an entrant in the 2024 Puny Comp, written in PunyInform and using the comp theme of the years around 1980.
It's basically like 4 games wrapped in one, increasing its length. The idea (which is complex so I may have it wrong) is that you're part of a series of spies who've taken the name Gromov as a way to be anonymous, and you and several other organizations are trying to change the history of the world. There are either 2 or 3 histories at play: one drone-filled world you start in, the normal world we live in, and a future where the US has been largely obliterated by nuclear weapons.
Most of the game is in the latter world. You explore three regions, each with their own themes, like clocks, music, and machinery. Then there is a final endgame.
The puzzles are quite difficult, and I was often stuck and reached out for help multiple times. You have to use intuition and experimentation, and it's not always clear what you should do. So this is great if you like carefully detailing notes and chewing on things for a long time, and less fun for casual players who just want to experience the story.
There were a lot of testers and implementation and writing were mostly smooth. I found a few small typos I passed onto the author, who has taken care of them. Outside of that, it's significantly polished.
Like it warns at the beginning, this game follows traditional viewpoints on WWII and the cold war, with the British as heroes and Nazi Germany (and later Soviet Russia) as the bad guys.
