Panic

I wanted to love Panic; I really did. It has everything that a horror fan like myself digs -- gloomy and morbid atmosphere, to-die-for writing, intricately detailed items, and the shadow of undying truth. Unfortunately, the puzzles are fiendishly difficult, and the first one is the worst. All the reviews I could find indicated the the players needed the walkthrough for the very first puzzle. Yeah, you read that correctly. For. The. Very. First. Puzzle.

Needless to say, I looked high and low for this walkthrough, but the website that hosts it no longer exists. Apparently no-one else commented on it in RGIF, either. So, I'm stuck with no way forward. What else is interesting about Panic?

It's written in ADRIFT, which usually sends me screaming the other direction. There is some purple prose (the altar, for instance), and it looks like the parser gets confused about parts of the organ. Besides that, the number of parser issues are so small that you'd be hard pressed to guess that ADRIFT was underneath it all.

The intro is a little strange, too, as it consists of sentences that scroll across the screen slowly. You must press a key to advance to the next sentence. On the Mac, only Spatterlight plays it correctly (MacScare doesn't work).

I wish I could say more, but unless you happened to get ahold of the walkthrough sometime in the past, you'd best leave Panic alone.