The Day time stood still

This game takes place right after the action-packed ending of The Day of the Queen. And as hinted at in that game, it involves time travel. Time travel games can be fun, if cleverly constructed. Unfortunately, this one is not. Most scenes feel quite random, and the various time periods don’t create an interesting whole; they seem to only exist to provide objects for the game’s puzzles.

And the puzzles themselves don’t advance the story much. But they’re also not very interesting as puzzles; they seem to exist mainly so that there are puzzles in the game. Luckily, they’re all easy to solve, either by logic or by simple trial and error with the objects you have (some actions only make sense after you’ve performed them). There was, however, one puzzle I rather liked, and which was quite clever (but well-hinted, so that it wasn’t too difficult to solve).

This is a relatively short game, compared to the previous two games in the series. Therefore, one might perhaps expect some polish? Unfortunately, this is not a well-polished game. For instance, in one room, all objects mentioned in the room description were unimplemented. And the one object that could be interacted with could only(?) be discovered by exploiting a bug in the parser ((Spoiler - click to show)the response to the command ‘take all’ mentions the object).

One thing I like about the Alex and Paul games is the humour (puerile as it undeniably sometimes may be). In this game there’s less of it, and it often falls flat.

All in all, this a perfectly playable game, with simple puzzles to solve, but it’s not one of the more interesting nor funny games in the series. Play it if you like the series and are curious about what happens in the story; skip it if don’t.