Birmingham IV

Birmingham IV is quite polished; nothing wrong with it in terms of basic craft. A couple of things soon rubbed me the wrong way, though, especially the annoying sentence you see after every examining action, and the inventory limit. The “I’ll drop you in the middle of something but won’t tell you who you are or what you are supposed to be doing” school of plotting is also not my favourite. Still, I was willing to persevere.

Then I hit the puzzles. The solution for getting past the guy on the bridge was so far out that I seriously doubt I would ever have arrived at it even if I had found all the necessary objects; but getting one of those objects in fact requires you to go into a direction that is not mentioned in the relevant room description! That bumps the puzzle into the unfair-and-impossible category. The next puzzle is getting past the troll, and here the solution doesn’t even make any sense. Why on earth does a troll go away if (Spoiler - click to show)I give it a portrait of my brother? Having lost all faith in my –- or anyone’s –- ability to solve this game’s puzzles, I decided to abandon it.