|
Have you played this game?You can rate this game, record that you've played it, or put it on your wish list after you log in. |
Caffeinationby Michael Loegering2003 Slice of life Inform 6
|
(based on 4 ratings)
1 review — 5 members have played this game.
14th Place - 9th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2003)
| Average Rating: based on 4 ratings Number of Reviews Written by IFDB Members: 1 Write a review |
This is a short game with multiple paths to getting through each puzzle. You are trying to get coffee to stay buzzed at work.
Many of the puzzles are unintuitive, like (Spoiler - click to show)looking in a book to get an apron for a different store. However, at least there are multiple routes for each puzzle. The implementation is spotty (TAKE ALL let's you take a door). Overall, I recommend it only for fans of the office genre.
SPAG
Okay, there are a lot of problems with this game, but I'm going to try to be constructive about it. This is a game where the author is having an enormously good time and the player is having no fun at all. That's a heck of a problem, and it's a sad one to have to point out to someone who's got a big cheesy grin on his face. This author went wrong somewhere along the line, and had no clue he was creating a total misfire, even has he continued to pack in numerous contrivances and clever details and elaborate red herrings and locations and multiple puzzles with multiple solutions.
-- J. Robinson Wheeler
See the full review
>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction
This may be a problem that deserves its own category: the "walkthrough-driven game". These games end up making me feel like one of the time travelers in Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder," terrified to step off the path lest everything around me be screwed up forever. That's certainly what happens with Caffeination. Especially after the first puzzle, I found myself confronted with one bug after another when I tried things that the game didn't expect.
Now, like the bugs in Sophie's Adventure, many of this game's bugs were beneficial to me, including one that allowed me to win without solving any of the coffee shop puzzles at all... Still, winning lacks its usual pleasure when it's done by exploiting a bug. I was happy enough to have the game overwith, but I wish it could have been different.