Flawed Addendum

"The story genre is 'Mystery'." A clue in true David Lynch fashion, this game drops you in the middle of a mysterious corridor adjoining on mysterious rooms filled with mysterious items and a mysterious man armed with a mysterious taser and - oh, who am I kidding? The only mystery in this game is the question of why the author thought he had written one.

Flawed Addendum isn't really a title I can skewer like Hors Categorie or Dog Saves Baby (whose author appears to have withdrawn the game from the Internet - thin skinned much?), but neither is it one I can particularly recommend. Unlike these shining examples of how an ambitious concept can suffocate under the weight of its own pretentiousness (both are virtually unplayable due to their hand-rolled libraries), Flawed Addendum is competently assembled, decently implemented...and arguably aspires to absolutely nothing at all.

The world of Flawed Addendum is well-detailed: rooms are furnished as you'd expect, and the machine in the foundry has several layers of description. Unfortunately, 95% of all this is pure decoration. Frustratingly, there are also some details on objects important to their use (Spoiler - click to show)(such as the keyhole on the disc or the battery compartment inside the niche) that aren't actually implemented, rendering some solutions slightly more obtuse than they really ought to be. There is precisely one NPC in the game, whose sole purpose is to vaguely menace the player (Spoiler - click to show)(although somewhat refreshingly, you are intended to attack and incapacitate him); otherwise, he is wholly uninteractive. This said, while the actual puzzle solving is entirely of the "get-x-use-x" variety, the author must be given credit for the lack of the "guess-the-author's-mind" puzzles which drown the two aforementioned games.

Taunting Donut, my only three-star review thus far, is much shorter than this game but received a higher rating. And why is this? Because Taunting Donut showed some imagination. Its puzzles are simple yet clever, its setting well-characterized, and the protagonist himself is actually given some personality through his reactions. It's not a snack-sized game; it's hardly even a nibble-sized game, but it shows a kind of creativity that, sadly, is lacking from Flawed Addendum. This is not to say that Flawed Addendum is bad in the same way that Dog Saves Baby is bad, though: in purely technical terms, Flawed Addendum is a competent work, and unlike The Gallery of Henry Beauchamp, the game can be puzzled through without leaping through arbitrary hoops. It's just disappointingly bland, that's all. It's a promising first showing, but it's spread too thin. It might have been better-served as a one-room game; there's certainly not enough content, however well-made, for the six rooms it takes up.

(Spoiler - click to show)(By the way, has anyone worked out how to get the eastern door open? The ending subtly implies I haven't done everything I could have, and considering the fact that the two keys are bronze and silver, that hints at the presence of a gold key buried somewhere...)

Sigh. Yet another adventure where I am totally stuck in the first two rooms. I have a coin, a key, and a screwdriver; and am facing 3 locked doors that my key does not fit.

Presumably the author wants me to try every possible verb on every possible object until something, for no logical or foreshadowed reason, works. Sorry.

I have no idea whether the entire puzzle takes place in these 2 rooms, or whether it's a giant adventure with hundreds of rooms waiting once I get past the door. Clue us in a little, authors. If it's a one-room puzzle, indicate that.

This is not fun.