Reverberations

This game started off with some guess-the-verb puzzles and some rough edges in room descriptions, but once the game started picking up, the storyline became very enjoyable.

You play a pizza delivery boy who has to run a pizza to a courthouse. As the game progresses, you experience ruins with the mafia, natural disasters, and essentially the collapse of society in your town. The last scene in the game is truly awesome.

Hard without the walkthrough due to a lack of synonyms

Have you ever been just leaving town when you are blocked by gigantic rabid gerbils? Well, if not, it is a horrible feeling. The same kind of hopeless feeling you get when you play a game which is well... Far out!

Well, don't get me wrong, I thought this game was rather humerous, with it's extreme implausibility, Quirky characters, horrifying villains (ok, well not that horrifying), and the hilarious puzzles. It isn't a game either which pretends to be serious. No, it laughs at it's characters, puzzles, and setting, all the way through, not taking itself seriously. It was definitely fun and and relaxing to play this game. It was nice to take a break from 'serious'. If and into something just enjoyable.

*sigh* Well, I said it was fun, and I said it was enjoyable, but this time has come...
What I found very frustrating about the game was the puzzles. Sure some of them were smooth, and fitting, but the majority...not so much. It was a 'read the author's mind to win the prize' type of moment. Of course I'm not really a practiced In telepathy, and even if I were, I don't know I would be able the read this guy's mind. Yes, the puzzle's solutions were obscure, and silly (the silly part was ok though), and I died quite a few times before I found, " oh! He wants me to do that?!?". Author's rules though, maybe I'm complaining because I was a pancake several times.

The last thing which I thought was poorly implemented was the sense of time in the game.
(Spoiler - click to show) I walked out of the store and the riot appeared. When I walked back in though, the store had already been trashed. Ok, maybe I'm hard to please, but couldn't there be an extra line of code which says people went in and trashed the store?

So there you have it, the good, the bad and the ugly (guido). If you have some minutes to spare, do play it.

Reverberations combines a silly (but functioning) plot with some fairly old-style gameplay. Room descriptions are sparse, objects are few, NPCs are terse, and the puzzle solutions tend to be very much of the "because the author said so" variety. Fortunately, there are some hints, as well as an available walkthrough, so it's possible to get through without too much frustration -- and a couple of the puzzles do feel pleasingly natural.

As for the story, well, it's not fabulous, and there are times when the game pokes fun at its own implausibility: the main character is a surfer/pizza delivery boy who just sort of stumbles into solving a high-profile mafia case, and has a bit of a romance with the district attorney as well. The events that contribute to this plot are all very thinly developed, too: searching for clues is usually a matter of wandering into the relevant room and noticing the one object there that is remotely interesting. And the DA is much too sketchily drawn to come across as much of a personality.

Reverberations is entertaining if you're looking for a way to kill forty-five minutes or so (more if you don't look at the hints), but it's not likely to stick with you long, either for the story or for the puzzles.