By All Reasonable Knowledge

This game needs a lot more work before it's even worth trying, let alone entering in a competition.

The intfiction.org review by B.J. Best enumerates a number of significant issues that hamper the most basic of interactions. I ran into those and more.

Beyond the numerous technical problems, it's been a long time since I've seen a new game with such a player-unfriendly approach to design. Disassembly shows that there is a lot of intended interaction, but the game does very little to help the player discover it. The most likely outcome of an attempt to play in good faith is tremendous frustration followed by an unexpected ending, the text of which presumes events that have not yet occurred.

There are built-in hints which seem necessary to review if one wants to get complete information about the objects in the room. However, each revealed hint costs the players points. This is somewhat ameliorated by a buggy scoring system that allows infinite points -- or at least it would if there wasn't a hard turn limit. Even the hint system is effectively anti-player.

The plot, such as it is, is also a jumbled mess. (Spoiler - click to show)The protagonist must deliver a big presentation and needs sleep. His marriage is on the rocks because he's been prioritizing his work life and handled a miscarriage poorly. He is paranoid and probably an alcoholic. Oh, and someone threatened to kill him and blow up his house.

My recommendation to the author is to visit intfiction.org for help in learning the basics of Inform 7. My advice to everyone else is to avoid this game until an improved version becomes available.

This game has a lot of interesting ideas (the phone dialing was especially interesting) but has deeply broken implementation.

It's a one room game but only the first time you look is everything described; after that, if you want to know what's in the room, you have to scroll back up to the first look you gave, at all other times it just gives a terse, unhelpful description. Parts of the room are implemented that aren't mentioned in descriptions. The floor is covered in 5 or 6 groups of things called 'objects' but if you 'x objects' the first thing that it defaults to are objects that aren't supposed to exist until later in the game and are described as missing and not visible even then. The help system asks you to type in keywords, but 90% of the time if you do it asks you to be more specific but doesn't give you a hint on how to do so. At one point you gain an object that let you unlock something, but UNLOCK doesn't work, you just have to OPEN the thing while holding the object. There is dirty underwear whose printed name is dirty socks but in messages its called dirty unmentionables, and if you TAKE it it describes you taking it but it spawns back into the hamper it came from.

So the clear issue here is practice with Inform. These kind of issues can be ironed out over time. I like to spend about equal amounts coding and testing/beta testing, because it takes a long time to figure this stuff out.

A lot of the actual material in the game is pretty good. The setting is creative and the numbers you can dial on the phone have some fun and unexpected responses. So all this needs is some more 'time in the oven'.