Degeneracy

Your holy mission to kill the degenerate baron has been fulfilled. You're standing over his corpse when the game starts. His subjects have already fled the castle and there ought to be no further obstacles. But as it turns out, his subjects have fled because they know the worst is yet to come.

Saying anything else about this game's plot threatens to ruin the core mechanic, which gradually reveals itself as you attempt to explore the castle. It's clever, but it's also a tad irritating. As the game closes in around you, your options diminish. This means it's very easy to waste time at the beginning, examining objects and rooms and whatnot, before you even realize that you're wasting time. When you do realize what's happening, it's probably too late.

The outcome leaves me conflicted. It's necessary to go into the game without preconceptions in order to get the most from the experience. However, this means that it will also likely punish you a few times until you learn to economize your puzzle-solving. The "optimal" good ending is also not as rewarding as the "normal" good ending, as though, after you've solved everything, the game is in a hurry to tidy up.

Nevertheless, it's well worth playing for the writing, mood, light humor, and the overall concept. Just be prepared to undo or restart.

This game is about a warrior who destroys a baron, only to discover himself cursed. You wander around a castle while investigating hidden rooms, ancient texts, and complicated puzzles, as well as running into some NPC's. The atmosphere is anti-heroic.

The main attraction of the game is the nature of the curse, which messes with IF conventions.(Spoiler - click to show)As the game progresses, room descriptions and objects become less and less implemented, until each room is just a number with nothing in it.

This is an enjoyable short puzzle game with an interesting mechanic, but it doesn't do much to realize its author-declared inspiration.

One can't discuss details without spoilers, so...

(Spoiler - click to show)
Per author Leonard Richardson's post-mortem, the original inspiration of this game took the following form:

"I had a silly idea which I was just about to start experimenting with, when I came up with an even sillier idea: a game which changed its version number as you played it. As I conceived it, you would start at the latest version, and as the version number slid inexorably downwards, objects would disappear, typos would pop up, and previously fixed bugs would come back like Jason back for another try."

The concept is intriguing! However, the author elaborates that: "It took about thirty seconds for me to connect this idea with the 'world in decay' scenario often seen in fantasy games."

I don't personally see the connection, and while I think the plot that Richardson invented for the game is clever and compelling, it doesn't quite jibe with the core mechanic of steadily reducing the version number of the game as it is being played. "Going back in time" in the game universe means something very different than "going back in time" in ours, so the metaphor doesn't really work.

There is certainly room for exploration with respect to themes of disintegrating reality (see Shade, for example, or the works of Philip K. Dick), but the regression of the protagonist's world to bare Inform 6 object implementations doesn't do this. The protagonist has no ability to understand it, and the player's understanding has no bearing on gameplay. The two conceptual schemes just seem totally divorced from one another -- not even books on Logick and Algorisms (or tomes on Conceptes Metaphysickal) in the baron's study to create a tenuous bridge.


Taken on its most basic terms, this is a relatively quick experience that makes for a fun enough bite-sized adventure. I only found one small bug: an issue with looking under an arm-chair that seems to be the result of a backwards condition in the logic that produces the response. A rather large amount of work went into what amounts to an extended Easter egg(Spoiler - click to show), or perhaps in this case an Easter Ham. It's definitely worth playing the game and examining its source code, which the author has graciously supplied.