Break-In

Baf's Guide

A very strange effort that jumps wildly from genre to genre. It starts out as a detective-style mystery--you're an ex-spy asked to steal some plans from a professor--but quickly turns into something between a farce and a satire, and takes various detours into other realms along the way. There are several clever multi-part, multi-object puzzles along the way, and there are plenty of funny bits, but the whole thing ultimately feels a little disjointed; the game isn't so much a send-up of any particular genre as a grab bag of different settings and conventions, and the player is likely to say "Huh?" a lot. There are a few bugs as well, though they're not major, and there's a hint menu.

-- Duncan Stevens

SPAG
The fluidity of the genre boundaries isn't the main problem here, though--it's the game design. It's not all that difficult to render the game unfinishable in unexpected ways--e.g., by failing to properly manage inventory before a change of scene, or by failing to pick up a hidden object before leaving an area that, it turns out, you won't be able to revisit. There's lots more of that than there needs to be, and it makes it difficult to enjoy the silliness of the game--inventory management is about a prosaic a task as IF offers. [...] It's a shame because, taken the right way, the game is actually very funny--the implicit premise is that spies after the end of the Cold War are reduced to concocting ridiculous projects to keep themselves busy, and the notion of espionage artists dealing with things like giant chickens is, at bottom, pretty amusing.
-- Duncan Stevens
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