Unfortunate

I loved the premise of this game — it puts you in a short, repeatable scenario as an accretive PC (something similar was used for The Copyright of Silence in the previous year's IFComp), and you use your knowledge to make predictions as a fortune teller.

After three runs through Unfortunate, you have enough information for completely accurate predictions. It poses an interesting question: should you predict misfortune and then passively watch it unfold? Or do you want to take action for more positive results?

Unfortunate is an ambitious work, and that ambition may have created some implementation issues. I played the IFComp version, which had exits that became inaccessible and descriptions that referenced non-existent objects. And I couldn’t predict misfortune and passively watch the results, because two characters completely disappeared from the game.

I would have appreciated it if Unfortunate set out its initial expectations more clearly; I approach puzzles differently when it’s clear that they’ll be a repeating sequence. This entry was fun, but more playtesting would have improved the experience.