Kurusu City

Baf's Guide

If there still were authoring systems' divisions in the IF Competition, Kurusu City would have won the one for TADS 2 games easily (the fact that the rivals were unusually weak in 2004 is a different thing, and certainly not the fault of the reviewed work). As Miki Maeda, a teenage girl, you bid defiance to the robots governing your home city. The overall light-hearted atmosphere of the game resembles that of the well-known Interstate Zero by Adam Cadre, and the town is inhabited by lots of young female NPCs. You're going to encounter enough good puzzles, although the game is somewhat disbalanced in this respect - in particular, the final puzzle provides for an anti-culmination. Besides, Kurusu City is a good deal longer than two hours, which shouldn't stop you from giving it a try outside the Comp.

-- Valentine Kopteltsev

>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction

I seem to have spent most of my review commenting on how strange and/or incomplete Kurusu City felt to me, so let me finish up by pointing out some well-done parts. There's a nice feature in the game's inventory code which prints out the results of an X ME before printing the inventory on the first time it's used. Subsequently, it just prints the inventory. I thought this worked so well that I'd like to see it become an IF standard. Also, there's a game-within-a-game that serves as an entertaining satire of the medium itself. There's a nice multi-stage puzzle involving gaining a credential, and I found the story interesting enough that I felt sorry when time ran out. Mostly, though, my reaction to Kurusu City was a puzzled shrug.
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