Finding Martin

Here is some of the pop culture referenced in this game:
(Spoiler - click to show)Lord of the Rings, Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, Song of the South, Peter Pan, Waiting For Godot, the play Rhinoceros, a knot theory joke, the ten-inch pianist joke, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Star Trek: Voyager, Zen koans (is that pop culture)?, famous mathematicians like Archimedes and Fibonacci, Duck Tales, etc.

And that's just the ones I could remember off the top of my head!

This game joins the list of ultra-long games such as Blue Lacuna, King of Shreds and Patches, Mulldoon Legacy, and Time: All Things Come to an End.

In gameplay, it resembles Mulldoon Legacy a lot; both are supersized versions of Curses!. You explore a huge structure, manipulating a variety of magical or technological systems, with a variety of hint systems.

Finding Martin has smooth implementation, including several very long time travel sequences interacting with multiple copies of yourself. This forms the last third of the game, and is the most technically competent time travel I have seen. Imagine All Things Devours as a subgame, 4 times.

Finding Martin has a tendency for very long text dumps. As I enjoy reading, this wasn't an issue, but there are probably 20+ cutscenes of 2-4 pages of text each.

As others have noted, Finding Martin is spottiest when it comes to hints. Some things are hinted well; in particular, there are several systems of providing hints, and if you get further in some puzzles, you'll unlock long cutscenes containing hints for other puzzles.

However, so many puzzles require leaps of intuition that you are bound to fail multiple times. For this, a walkthrough is essential. I've tried to upload a walkthrough to IFWiki that I found on web.archive.org, but it didn't seem to go through. The link is https://web.archive.org/web/20080516223332/http://www.qrivy.net/~gayla/fm_walk.txt

This game, as with Mulldoon Legacy, should be more played and more discussed. However, both games suffer from information overload. I get stressed playing Blue Lacuna, which can be played puzzlelessly, and even Counterfeit Monkey, where puzzles are well-clued. These games (Mulldoon and Martin) are just too darn hard to be solved by anyone without clues.

However, my strategy for such games is to play through with a walkthrough, then come back months or years later and try to play without a walkthrough. I've done Curses! 3 times now this way, and I hope to do it without a walkthrough. I hope to replay Finding Martin one day.