Winchester's Nightmare

Baf's Guide

An odd effort--compelling in spots, but often frustrating as well. You're Sarah Winchester, wife of the gun manufacturer, haunted by the horrors you've loosed on the world, and you bounce between a simpler, less violent past and the future you have helped create. It's a thoughtful and complex work, packed with metaphor and unusual connections. The implementation, however, needs help: the game is written in the third person, and the ">" prompt has been replaced by "Sarah decides to," with most familiar abbreviations disabled. The idea may have been to tell the story without reliance on IF conventions, but requiring that the player type needlessly long-winded commands is likely to yank him or her out of the story. The game also is sufficiently story-oriented that the puzzles, when they do come along, feel out of place; moreover, there are lots of locations that initially help make the landscape feel complete, but which the player ends up having to revisit toward the end in hopes of solving a puzzle, which lessens the overall enjoyment. Plenty of thought went into this, in short, but ultimately it doesn't work as well as it might.

-- Duncan Stevens