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Your task is simple enough. Just nab the chalice.
9th Place overall; 3rd Place (tie), Miss Congeniality Awards - 15th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2009)
Winner, Best Individual Puzzle - 2009 XYZZY Awards
| Average Rating: based on 57 ratings Number of Reviews Written by IFDB Members: 7 |
This is a very clever little game. It is one of those games that basically have a single puzzle. In this case there are a couple of things you have to do, but once you work out what’s going on, it’s not enormously difficult to do them. The tricky part is working out what’s going on. The best procedure if you are having difficulty with this is but don’t want to be told the answer outright is (Spoiler - click to show)to make a map, showing where you actually can and can’t go, and compare that to the map that is provided.
It is hard to say any more than that without spoiling the game.
The basic mechanic is very simple (if utterly confusing at first), and there is nothing really to the game other than this: no objects besides the couple involved in the puzzle, and not much else to look at along the way. The puzzle itself is short and the game does not take long to play at all once you twig. What content there is seems to be well implemented and I didn’t find any bugs.
Overall, then, this is a simple game that does little other than introduce an initially confusing but ultimately elegant mechanic and leave the player to work out what that mechanic is – but it does it very well indeed.
This is a rather short game, but a relatively enjoyable one. It has one larger "worldview" puzzle in which you must work out the fundamental nature of the game, including how to interpret your senses, and one minor puzzle that stems pretty directly from this. It can be solved pretty easily without any assistance from the walkthrough while still being satisfying to complete; a quite positive trait, really. However, the atmosphere of the game is very sparse, the room descriptions are minimal and the world feels quite empty. Objects seem to be only minimally implemented, and one of the puzzles involves being alerted to something you have likely already guessed the existence of. All told, it is a fun diversion and an interesting concept, and, as a one-trick-pony of a game, its brevity does it a favor.
I rated 5 this game because I found it to be an excellent piece of playable-IF to solve. A mind-bending puzzle that captures the player without a sense of frustration. Overall, it shouldn't take too long to complete it.
Since the very beginning of play you "sense" that something is strange ... that sensation kept me going ahead without frustration even though I moved around in circles for quite a while, but I knew that somehow I was on the right track. Then ... it "clicked" to me and everything was clear. Nevertheless, once the core of the puzzle is grasped it still takes some strategic moves to actually solve it.
No distractions, just a polished and well presented puzzle with all its elements in plain sight. Nice atmosphere.
Surely one of its own kind -- I don't recall coming across any similar puzzles.
Jay Is Games
Byzantine Perspective makes the perfect lunchtime game: quick to play and very satisfying to work out.
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