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Review
First, caveat that this isn’t the kind of IF I’d normally play; I’m interested in the early days of the medium, but not so much in modern games that hearken back to them, and I generally like a strong story to go with my exploration and puzzle solving. So I am not the target audience for this one, but due to it being a part of this year's Review-a-thon, I still wanted to give it a try!
First, the presentation is very nice—it’s a clean layout with text encapsulated by boxes over background images that set the mood of each chapter perfectly. An inventory pane on the left side is a nice touch, and during one puzzle, a handy reference pops up in that sidebar too.
One aspect of the UI that didn’t work as well for me was the separate box for command responses. The room description always remains static in one box, but then all the other text cycles through the other—so you type a command, get a response, and then the response disappears (relegated to the text history, which you can view with a click) after you enter the next command. I found this a bit inconvenient when there was a description of something that I wanted to refer back to frequently, and this setup also requires a LOT of pressing enter—the response text was often broken up into two or more pieces, with an enter press required between each pair.
I also found myself fighting the parser at times. One example:
You can see a glowing blue object.
>x blue
You can’t examine that.>x glowing
You can’t examine that.>x glowing blue object
You can’t quite make out what the glowing blue object is.>get it
You can’t get that>get glowing blue object
You can’t get that
The first part of this sequence primed me to think that I had to type the full name of a thing to interact with it, but then the full name didn’t work when I tried to take, rather than examine, the object (the correct command turned out to be (Spoiler - click to show)“get object”).
There were other points where I struggled due to a lack of cuing. For instance, in the first room you’re collecting pieces of a cube, guided by a four-line poem. (Spoiler - click to show)I thus assumed I needed four pieces, and kept looking after finding three, but actually three was it; I learned this by re-examining the fragments, but I would have expected to be told I had them all upon collecting the third. I did enjoy that area (Chapter 2), though, especially the moment when I tried, certain it wouldn’t work, (Spoiler - click to show)putting my amulet in a lion statue’s mouth as a way to get rid of it—and that was actually the puzzle solution! The mirror area in chapter 6 was another highlight, with the portal being a fun mechanic (although I used the walkthrough for the exact wording—I didn’t remember (Spoiler - click to show)what the game had called the place where I dropped the sword, and it didn’t accept “chasm” or other synonyms that I tried. And I had no idea at all how to refer to the room where the sphere was).
In other areas, I leaned pretty heavily on the walkthrough. In Chapter 4, for example, (Spoiler - click to show)the game had cued me to be afraid of the toad, so I would never have guessed that purposely making him angry was the solution. I was also a bit disappointed by the final puzzle because it was so repetitive and, I felt, unintuitive ((Spoiler - click to show)I’d noticed the beast always lost focus after I dodged, but because it then immediately prepares an attack as usual, I hadn’t interpreted that as a cue to attack it); it didn’t feel like the strongest note to end on.
On the other hand, I liked the ending (Spoiler - click to show)twist about our mysterious guide and the player character’s fate. And the environments were fun to imagine and inhabit; the steampunk flying bridge, the firefly torch, the rotating room, were all memorable and cool. Some of the issues I brought up are definitely a matter of taste, and some good playtesting would smooth out the others.
