Madame L'Estrange and the Troubled Spirit

Baf's Guide

Strange is right. You're an Sydney psychic investigating weird doings involving a big nasty animal on the loose and an apparently unrelated murder of a scientist. This feels like a short story that was inexpertly converted into IF--you get long, long chunks of text with no interaction potential, most of which is in the third person, past tense (whereas the parser still thinks it's in second person, present tense, of course). Spelling and grammar problems abound, as well as other bugs--it's hit or miss whether SAVE crashes the game or not. Yet the story is pretty good, and some aspects are well-implemented, for instance a TRAVEL TO feature that whisks you around town. Try it if you're in a forgiving mood. No hint menu, but there's a walkthrough included (via a HELP menu).

-- Duncan Stevens

SPAG
Whoever did the writing here did a LOT of it; there are several situations where many full screens of text go by between inputs. Often, those scenes include fairly complicated dialogue by your character, handy in a way--since this game certainly isn't up to much in the way of parsing input--but also a bit destructive of the interactive element. Most of the characters have a two- or three-screen spiel to tell you, and once you've found that, you're generally safe moving on to the next character; the authors did not conceal the relevant information under a variety of topics. That speeds things along, I guess, though it does make the whole thing feel mechanical.
-- Duncan Stevens
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>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction

Madame L'Estrange and the Troubled Spirit (hereafter called MmeLTS) is a frustrating game, because it builds such a slipshod house upon a very promising foundation. The game is riddled with what I would guess are at least a hundred grammar and spelling errors. It flipflops seemingly at random between past and present tense. It can't seem to decide whether to address the player in the second or third person. It consistently causes a fatal crash in at least one interpreter (WinFrotz). All this would be easy to evaluate as simply the product of incompetent authors if it didn't take place in a game that starts with an interesting premise, executes a number of great interface decisions, and manages to unroll a complicated mystery plot along the way. As it is, MmeLTS is a great mess that could've been a contender if only it had been written with more care.
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