Aayela

In Aayela, you play a young and expendable knight off to find the magical stone that will cure the queen's illness. This story is mostly an excuse to get you into a cave, where the game's main gimmick quickly becomes apparent: your lamp goes out, and most of the game is spent in darkness.

Exploring a cave in the dark could be very interesting, but Aayela fails to do its premise justice: not only is the cave exceedingly small, but there is in fact little difference between this game and a game where you explore a cave with light. You do not have to guess the identity of objects from their form, smell, taste or sound -- feeling something will always identify it for you. From the point of view of the player, typing "examine" and typing "feel" is not much of a difference. You do have to discover some things by feeling around, but these quasi-puzzles are familiar from other games where you have to feel under or in things.

What remains is an enjoyable little tale with different endings depending on a choice the character can make at the end. Olsson writes good, if perhaps somewhat overblown, prose, and the final scene is much more memorable than the cave itself. So, as a snack sized diversion, Aayela is certainly worth playing; but much more could have been done with it.