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You've practiced long and hard for PotionComp, but Grusilda won't give up her title so easily. UGH! Curse that Grusilda!
A one-room potion-brewing spell-casting parser puzzler, where things might go opposite the way you planned.
Nominee, Best Puzzles; Nominee, Best Individual Puzzle; Nominee, Best Individual PC - 2015 XYZZY Awards
Entrant overall; 2nd Place, Overall; 2nd Place, Best Writing; 2nd Place, Best Story; 1st Place, Best Puzzles; 1st Place, Best Technical - ParserComp 2015
| Average Rating: Number of Reviews Written by IFDB Members: 7 |
This is a fun, relatively short game with a great sense of humour and a lovely writing style. The puzzles aren't too tricky (although I occasionally felt that I'd come up with a valid solution that simply didn't work), and the in-game hint system is great at nudging you in the right direction without spoiling too much. The game embraces its light-hearted quirkiness, resulting in puzzles that are a joy to solve. The story is slightly more poignant than I'd expected, which was a nice surprise.
In this game, you play a witch who has been confined to a single room during a potion competition. You must brew a potion to win, however, you suffer a major disadvantage, because there is something wrong with your magic.
I was hesitant about this game at first, because I found the language annoying (imagine the writing by Anna from Frozen: "I am SO going to catch her!"). Also, the first few puzzles were almost trivial.
However, I realized as time went on that the writing produced a consistent and interesting worldview (as the backstory unfolded), and that the first puzzles were just an easy tutorial. The game got progressively more difficult, until I needed 3 hints to get through puzzles.
The hints are very mild, provided entirely by your cat's actions.
There's a few red herrings in this game, and a bit of 'guess the author's brain', but by the time I finished, I realized that I genuinely enjoyed this game.
Enjoyed the one-room format and lighthearted, quirky characters! The puzzles and magic were creative and just the right amount of difficulty.
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