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Less Awful Than You Might Think, November 17, 2013This is a Crap Underimplemented Game. That's pretty much its genre. There's never a description where "You see nothing special about the X" will do, and you're lucky to get that. This isn't a good thing; it necessarily limits immersion, occasionally gets in the way of understanding what's going on, and breaks any trust in the author one might have thought of having.
But "The Chronicler" is not entirely lacking in merit. For one, despite what the author says about its unfinished state, it can be played to an ending. For another, it's actually reasonably possible to get to that ending. The puzzles are fair -- no guess the verb that I can remember -- and, unlike many a better game, they revolve around a consistent central mechanism that's rather clever: (Spoiler - click to show)You can travel back and forth between two moments in time, and changes you make in the past affect what you can do in the future. This isn't the first game to use this mechanism, but it's reasonably well implemented and reveals itself fairly.
In the end, I found the mechanism engaging enough that I played the game all the way through and got a half hour of decent diversion from it. This is more than I can say of some objectively better games. The author ought to spend a lot more time polishing things, implementing scenery, and either finishing the things he's left unfinished (some alternate endings and a hint of plot) or excising them from the game completely. But I didn't find it a complete waste of my time. That exceeded my expectations.