Pintown

Baf's Guide

A reasonably novel premise for IF--mend your relationship with your girlfriend--but ruined by bugs, including one that makes the game unfinishable, and general game design problems that make what you're supposed to do next, according to the walkthrough, a series of total surprises. Lots of read-the-author's-mind puzzles.

-- Duncan Stevens

>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction

Playing Pintown was an extremely frustrating experience. The game was loaded with errors, both in its writing and in its coding. Even the walkthrough had bugs. I went through two hours and two interpreters trying to get the program to respond in such a way as not to crash the game, and after 45 minutes I stuck with the walkthrough. Even with the walkthrough, it took me another hour to finally get the game to stop crashing, and once I had done that a runtime bug derailed three puzzle solutions and magically eliminated the person following me. By the time I figured out that the game is unwinnable (at least according to the walkthrough provided by the author) I really didn't care anymore. The game's puzzles were infuriatingly arbitrary, its plot made no sense, and its prose was both very unhelpful and heavily burdened with grammar and spelling errors.
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