Delightful Wallpaper

Delightful Wallpaper by Andrew Plotkin is a fantasy/mystery puzzle game that is as much removed from being fun as possible. The minimalist, fragmental story does not provide much of an incentive to figure out maze puzzles so hard they put diamond (which is as we all know the hardest metal known the man!) to shame.

The interactivity is very limited in this game. I found myself trying to pick up objects time and again, only to be foiled by the protagonist's (who initially comes across as some kind of gentleman burglar) smug unwillingness to "manipulate gross material substance". Using your inventory in this game is mostly limited to your trusty (telepathically controlled, then?) notepad, which, of course, only serves you baffle you even more how to progress in the ever-changing maze scenery. Moving around your protagonist opens and closes pathways and doors (generously, no map is provided. Hint system? Nope.), inevitably sending you around in circles and engendering frustration-induced headaches. The difficulty in wrapping your mind around a multitude of sometimes-connected rooms is painfully juxtaposed with how utterly uninteresting it is being a nameless character exploring an empty house of immovable objects with no real goal or mission in the first place!

In fact, there is really not much needed to be said about Delightful Wallpaper. (Spoiler - click to show)By the way, the wallpaper - you guessed it - serves no purpose in the story whatsoever. The ending is brief and does not reveal any additional information that would justify wasting your time on a game that should be used only for testing interactive fiction auto-solving programmes.

Good coding? Definitely.
Fun to play? Not at all. Not at all.

No rating due to the fact that after one third of the game I got helplessly stuck, but couldn't be bothered to put too much effort into progressing on my own and instead finished the game by following the walkthrough.