Poor Zefron's Almanac

Baf's Guide

A silly genre-bending romp that starts out as fantasy and ends up as science fiction. You're a wizard's apprentice, but the wizard has disappeared, and now it seems that a dragon is attacking the town. Very funny in parts, but the game itself is uneven--a tight inventory limit that complicates things, some random death, some strange NPC behavior. Still, the whimsy factor makes this one worth playing.

-- Duncan Stevens

>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction

Right about the time that Poor Zefron's Almanac (hereafter called PZA) starts feeling like another humdrum sword-and-sorcery game, it executes a nice surprising twist. To say too much more would be to give the game away, but the fact that the author bills PZA as "an interactive cross-genre romp" is a clue toward its direction. This twist made the game refreshing and fun again, especially after the frustration it caused me when I began playing it...

Because of a fairly flexible (but extremely temporary) magic spell that becomes available at the very beginning of the game, I found myself repeatedly stranded, unable to proceed and forced to RESTART. This happened again later on in the game -- I committed a perfectly logical action and found out hundreds of turns later that this action had closed off the endgame. This is a frustrating experience, and one that could easily have been avoided with a few minor changes to the game's structure, changes which would not have had any discernible effect on puzzles or plot. In addition, there are a few areas in which the player character can be killed without warning, always an unwelcome design choice. PZA is (as far as I know) Carl Klutzke's first game, so chalk these flaws up to education. I look forward to playing another Klutzke game as well-implemented as PZA, but designed more thoughtfully.
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