Not Just A Game

Baf's Guide

It's time for your Go lesson, but your teacher has mysteriously disappeared. Can you find her and figure out what's really going on? Contains some actual puzzles, but also a huge pseudo-maze and whole lot of busywork; doesn't actually require much Go knowledge until the endgame. An interesting diversion, but it could have been so much more.

-- R. Serena Wakefield

Brass Lantern
The combination of the game of Go and the teacher's hinted-at magical interests should provide fertile ground for puzzle hooks, from logic problems to more traditional manipulation of alchemical apparatus. Once out of the house, however, the game becomes simply a string of rooms containing unlinked puzzles. Most of the detail of the setting is thrown away. Several of the rooms contain complex contraptions: some of them have obvious uses (such as a water wheel providing power) but others are merely bizarre and out of place (a crystal sculpture is topped with a water-filled cylinder containing, for no apparent reason, a red rubber ball).
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SPAG
The writing is quite good--it's rarely especially evocative (the setting is largely pretty unremarkable, after all), but it also rarely gets in the way of the game, which takes some skill in itself. There's also some humor scattered here and there, documented in an 'amusing' section. There are likewise few technical flaws or game design problems: one section involves a lot of traipsing around, which does get tiresome after a while, but at least it's straightforward traipsing. The story itself requires some disbelief-suspending, but no more than your average fantasy game, to be fair--and the only reason that the suspensions of disbelief here require a conscious effort is that the initial genre of the game isn't clear from the outset, and the setting wanders back and forth a bit between Western suburbs and, um, a vaguely Oriental setting. That may be jarring initially, but it's also rather creative, and it allows for some interesting juxtapositions.
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