Indigo

Sometimes I think Emily Short has a competition with herself to see how many different magic systems she can come up with.

In this short game, you can take amounts of time from an object and place them in another object. The game makes this fairly simple.

This is a speed-IF, which generally means messy implementation. That doesn't show up as much here, except for leaving the tower. Also, the ending took me a bit to figure out.

Beyond being just a speed IF, this was a new-language speed IF, which means that Emily Short learned TADS and made this game all in a couple of days. Extremely impressive.

Emily Short's games are always intriguing and original, Indigo is no exemption. It's a wonderful short IF. The story was compelling and the magic system interesting.

Please keep in mind that Indigo was written in a couple of days and is marked as unfinished. That being said, it did have a weakness: game play. For most of the game, I found myself playing 'guess the verb', though to be fair, the about did say it was unfinished and as such, was bound to have problems. The main thing I had a problem with was (Spoiler - click to show)correctly formatting the command to take time. I knew from the beginning I needed to transfer a month from the apple to the potion. Yet when I tried take month from apple, the interpreter informed me that the month was part of the apple and couldn't be taken. take month, the correct command, and take month from apple should produce the same results. The game, while brilliant, was riddled with small errors like this.

In spite of this, I would recommend indigo to any and all IF players.

Emily Short turns IF on its head every time she makes a new game. She excels in 2 areas: a) she has an incredible command of prose - the stories are very compellingly told. I would pay to read her books; b) Imaginitive story-telling mechanics (think the servants and bells in Bronze) and ingenious game-play mechanics (don't waste too much time figuring this one out). I also had to look at the hints to get started - and the clues were right there from the start! An incredible play on words - and all done in 4 afternoons!