Ratings and Reviews by Brian Conn
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Frustrating, well worth playing anyway, February 3, 2014For me the main obstacle was that certain puzzles require you to have a good idea of the 3-D topography of the game world. I'm not very good at constructing that kind of thing in my head, and the game, although decently clear, was not very good at helping me, and so there were several key actions that I never would have guessed without a walkthrough.
The parser is also limited, but that didn't really give me trouble.
What the game does do exceptionally well is build a sense of isolation and real dread out of what would seem to be an innocent scenario. The writing is excellent, not just in the sense of describing sunsets (though it does that too), but in that it maintains a subtle and seamless emotional tone throughout. Your friends are just across the river, but you nevertheless get the feeling that there is something serious at stake -- much more so than in most games where you are jumping off buildings and saving the world and so on.
My advice is to go in committed, spend some time, and try your best, but look at a walkthrough before you start to hate the thing. The solutions to the puzzles are satisfying but not worth banging your head against the wall for.
Straightforward Puzzle-Based IF, February 13, 2010The plot: You show up to visit your old friend John, but he's nowhere to be found; you get trapped in his house by a snowstorm; there seems to be some kind of crazy tunnel in his basement. Adventure ensues. A goblin, a demon, a devil; color-coded rooms.
The puzzles are good overall. A couple of them have particularly nice twists; a couple, on the other hand, seem a bit random, but the game is small enough that even the random ones can be solved by experimentation and you don't have to go too crazy.
What's mostly lacking is atmosphere. I don't think I formed a really vivid image of any location or object in the game. Everything is described minimally, and the only objects implemented are those necessary for the puzzles. At the beginning the protagonist does have a nice humorous voice as he talks about John and his habits, but that too goes away once you get underground.
If you're looking for a decent demon-puzzle or two and don't want to be bothered with the rest, go for it.
Some Ideas, Weak Story, February 10, 2010Most of my reactions have already been expressed by previous reviewers, but I wanted to add this: Although the game may or may not work as a psychology test or an exploration of morality, it fails as a story. The exposition is good, and some of the early description drew me in, but as I went on my feeling of being an actor in a fictional world started to fade. By the end I had no sense of urgency; I was making choices as I'd make choices on a psychology test, without any notion that they'd affect characters I cared about.
The problem was illustrated most clearly for me in the last scene, in which the protagonist, who has been repeatedly committing an evil act, is offered the choice of committing that act again or doing something else. The character presumably is driven to commit the act (he's been doing it for a while), but as the player I had no such compulsion. So the game for me went approximately like this:
Game: You are caught in a possibly unbreakable cycle of evil! Do you break it?
Me: y
Game: OK.
If the game had developed its world more thoroughly and made me identify more deeply with the character, that scene would have been troubling to say the least. As it was I just felt like I was pressing buttons.
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