You are standing in a cave...

You play an undefined protagonist (as good looking as ever!) who wakes up in a cave. I think this may be a first effort and while it leans a little heavily on puzzle-game cliches, there's plenty of attention given to the writing and making sure the environments are interesting. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like it was playtested at all. You start out in a room with three passages leading out of it, but no indication of what direction anything is in or how the passages are different. Okay, let's pick...west? Ah, apparently I just went through a secret door I wasn't supposed to know about until much later, and the game assumes I've solved all the puzzles to get to this point. Oops.

You also can't 'look passages'--but you can 'look passage', and it'll ask you which one, and finally you get a list of the differences and can look at them individually. The game, as far as I got, is full of this kind of thing--which is a shame because the writing is fine and the world has the rich flavor of mid-90s Mystiness, full of gears and symbols and mysterious whimsical machinery. I found pieces of a lot of puzzles, complete with alternate solutions (some suboptimal)--there's a lot here and I can tell a lot of work and thought went into it. It would probably look fantastic if you read a complete transcript of play from someone who knew all the right commands in the right order, but if you deviate from what it expects, stuff gets weird quick.

The author has a lot of potential, and my rating reflects in part what this game could be as much as what it is. In its current form it needs a little more technical experience (and playtesters!) to get it into a shape where it's not a struggle to play, at least for me.

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