Teaching her to dance

This dour slice-of-robot-apocalypse life aims to deliver the tension of a race against death with a narrow high-tech escape. Unfortunately, between some very rough syntax and a surprisingly narrow implementation of the puzzle, it falls well short of its aims.

I would have given a two-star review, squinting through the significant non-native English issues which cloud the story, if I had not needed to decompile the game in order to detect the necessary commands (Spoiler - click to show)throw fish at portal and (Spoiler - click to show)throw figure at portal. I knew what the game wanted me to do, but several other combinations of manipulating the direct and indirect objects together failed. It's also a very old-school conceit to force the player to jump through hoops before taking the obvious only escape route available. Our character is convinced (rightly so) that the fog is death. The machine offers some sort of chance. Why would we need to be convinced of its safety? Why would we need to go through that exercise twice?

Equally troubling is the fact that this single puzzle in two parts is not given much weight in prose and imagery. I should be getting just as much out of examining the figure as I do in (Spoiler - click to show)throwing it, but instead that action is given just a quick emotional name-check and is otherwise very mechanical.

These linear speed-shorts tend to succeed best when they parcel out roughly equal amounts of weighty narrative at each step: starting the game, discovering the problem, getting the tools together to solve the puzzle, solving the puzzle, executing the final move. Teaching her to dance instead splits almost all its story between the intro screen and "The End", and makes it unnecessarily difficult to bridge that gap.

(found while exploring un-reviewed games)