Under, In Erebus

Number of Reviews: 3
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Failed to grab me, April 14, 2013

This one... failed to grab me.

I mean, I had some amusing moments, but they were accidental, such as this bit during the opening sequence, in which the PC is having a bit of a bad day on a very crowded train:

Two or more of your neighbors seem to be competing for the right to stand on top of your feet.

>KILL EVERYONE
You can't find anything relevant by that name.

If you are new to interactive fiction, you may like to try typing HELP.

I heard there's some clever shtick to the puzzles here, but the game failed to inspire motivation in me, and upon asking for a hint the game angered me by telling me I hadn't explored everywhere. It was true, I hadn't explored everywhere, but that was because exits were not always conveniently mentioned in room descriptions. Silly me for not exploring exits that I didn't know existed.

So then I was at the point where I started randomly typing directions just to see where the exits were. (ARGH!) Then it occurred to me to see if there was an EXITS verb, which there was, but then there was this clunky addendum at the end of all the room descriptions: From here you can go northeast to an unknown location, southeast to The Place You Just Came From, and east to an unknown location. How hard is it, in a game with a map requiring exploration, to seamlessly blend exits into room descriptions? Not difficult. People have been doing this since the 1970s.

In some fairness, the landscape is dark. Instead of operating on visuals, you're operating on touch and sound. Some of that's done well, but I failed to grasp a lot of what was going on around me, and I don't think it was the lack of visuals. Things just weren't articulated to me very well. I think you could still craft comprehensible room descriptions with stimuli gained through non-visual cues.

Anyway, I got pretty frustrated with this one, and it wasn't that engaging to me, and when I did find out what the goals of the game were (by typing >GOALS) I realized that things really. Were. Not. Well. Clued. At. All. I also spoiled myself by typing >SECRETS to find out what the shtick was. Huh, the shtick might have actually been fun, were I not already so frustrated.