Earl Grey

I was hoping to like Earl Grey more than I actually did. The game's upper-class English writing style befitting a tea party is very well-done, and the characters are memorable. The game also gives you some of the protagonist's internal monologue after each move, which can clue you in to what to do next or (more often) give you a joke. I found the jokes to be a bit excessive later in the game, but there were some clever ones too ("You know, Eaves, it's not like I didn't have other options today. One of my friends offered to teach me to fish! I could have eaten for a lifetime!")

The game is a bit like a reverse Counterfeit Monkey. Here, you get to take letters out of things and transform them, then re-insert the letters. Confusingly, a few puzzles involve removing a letter, doing something, then putting the letter back where you found it. The opening has you do this twice in a row and I had no idea what happened differently between the two times -- the dialogue made me think I screwed up the puzzle and it was giving me another attempt. And the biggest problem I had with the game is how confusing some of the puzzles can be. They get really abstract or make use of things you don't think too much about.

There's a lot of potential with this game, but I found it a bit messy. David Welbourn's walkthrough is very helpful if you just want to read through the story without struggling with the more esoteric puzzles.

I enjoyed this puzzler tremendously, and I was won over by the characters.

Early Grey is a game about wordplay and puzzles; you have the ability to remove letters from words and put them back in. By doing so, you change the environment around you.

I found this game extraordinarily difficult. Of the two dozen or so puzzles in the game, I figured out maybe 2-3 on my own, which is the worst I've done in any wordplay game (Ad Verbum, Counterfeit Monkey, Shuffling Around, Threediopolis).

However, someone else could definitely have more luck. The world building in the game is fun, and the dialogue and characters you meet are truly interesting. However, I had no idea what was going on in the ending.

Overall, I was left frustrated and confused. But I feel that another player may have much more fun.

I really enjoy word games, so when I heard the premise of this game I knew I had to give it a try. So you start off getting ready to host a tea party. And then you talk for a while, get to learn about your newfound power to manipulate the written world around you... But of course as everyone knows, curiosity killed the cat. And so fiddling with these new powers might get earn you some just retribution.

This was a great concept, wonderfully clever and strategically employed. Clearly the author put much thought into every word. Not only that, but he's still managed to make the game witty and interesting to boot! Soon, though, it can become pretty tricky, and one might have to resort to a walkthrough or hints. Also, there seemed a few things in game that should be able to have letters stolen or added, and yet they couldn't (but something like this is almost unavoidable). This game is original and fresh, a great game.

Earl Grey relies on what I think is a pretty ingenious gimmick (which may or may not make up for any other shortcomings it has). The avatar in the game is given a magical bag that allows you to manipulate the words used to describe the world around you in one of two ways. You may either ‘KNOCK’ a letter out of a word, or ‘CAST’ a letter into a word.

For instance, if you are “Standing in the room with someone’s Aunt,” you could ‘KNOCK’ the last word in that sentence and suddenly you’d be “Standing in the room with someone’s ant.” The only restriction the game places on the player (presumably, there are a few missteps in the implementation) is that the resultant sentence must be grammatically correct.

This clever manipulation of the world is pretty exciting at first, but the game very quickly falls into drudgery when you realize how carefully every sentence is worded such that KNOCKing and CASTing opportunities are, in fact, limited to a single linear path of puzzles leading you from start to finish. The incredible freedom you might imagine with the power to change one letter in any description just doesn’t measure up to the implementation here. Often your avatar is shoved from featureless room to featureless room using one-way portals instead of doors so you end up with no spatial reference.

In the end, if a room has something in it, it’s going to be KNOCKed or CASTed eventually. The stranger the placement of the word in the sentence is also a good sign that something needs to be manipulated. You might think this would be a benefit to gameplay, however, the puzzles you are presented with sometimes require two or three separate KNOCKs and subsequent CASTings to solve and the intermediary steps often don’t appear to be taking you any closer to your goal.

Furthermore, there is a definite feeling that the puzzles were developed prior to the environment they were placed in, which explains why portals whisk you from place to place and that the flow of solutions doesn’t seem to follow logical sense. I’d think the most satisfying chain of puzzles would involve making a number of changes to a single sentence that get you closer and closer to your goal until they all add up to the solution. But Earl Grey doesn’t have many situations like that. In fact the only one I can think of that comes close was (Spoiler - click to show) when you saw a statue with a crown, and then continued to knock it until you ended up with a moon in the sky so you could turn the moon's 'luster' into a 'cluster' of rocks to stand on. Only that last bit will make sense and the rest is just playing around with anything the game lets you. Instead, if there are three sentences describing an area, there will be three changes to be made one to each of the sentences and ONLY in the order the game wants you to make them.

So, while the game has a brilliant idea here, it doesn’t succeed in fully exploring it, which disappoints. It does, however, have a very funny and charming commentary by the player character that appears after the command prompt after every effective action. It appears to be the stream of consciousness of the PC you’re controlling, and, if so, he’s a pretty sarcastic person and definitely witty. One action comes to mind is when you enter a room and see a large clock standing to one side. Naturally I tried to KNOCK the clock and, as a result, a large lock ends up standing to one side. The commentary at the bottom of the screens says: “Yeah, that could have gone one of two ways.”

So, my recommendation is to give it a try at least to experience this interesting gameplay mechanic, but keep the walkthrough handy for when the game goes off on a path that doesn’t immediately make sense.