Ratings and Reviews by Michael Martin
View this member's profile
One of the finest decoding puzzles I've ever encountered, February 20, 2008The goal of this game is straightforward; as the gostak, you distim the doshes. Alas, the lutt to the doshery is crenned with glauds! But surely a snave gostak such as yourself can discren them.
And, I note, the entire game is like this, including very and deeply extensive meta information. At no point is the central linguistic conceit dropped. I'm a sucker for this, and indeed this is one of my favorite games as a result, but more importantly, the game is approachable in a way that most IF with a metatextual conceit is not. That said, some basic familiarity with the standard Inform library will greatly enhance one's experience with the game, as many (to me) critical clues for solving the game's language came from default responses.
The Gateway Drug of IF, February 20, 2008Despite being admittedly wholly self-indulgent and packed with in-jokes, this is actually the work of IF that I've had the most success evangelizing with. It's a one-turn game, so there's no investment of time, the large development team means there is an enormous amount of widely varied responses are available, and a half-dozen or so players each on their own copy will end up bouncing off one another's attempts and - in some cases - actually working out a lot of the basics of IF interaction on their own. It's one thing to read up on how to give commands to NPCs in the standard IF idiom; it's another thing entirely to be rewarded by five or six new endings for ordering the booth around.
And even if they don't, a lot of the in-jokes are pretty funny even without the context. I approached this game entirely ignorant of the newsgroups and the general community in question, and not only did it enthrall me for hours, I laughed until I cried at least twice.
* * * You have read a review * * *
A fantastic plaything for a lexically-enhanced cyborg, February 20, 2008This is a (mostly) one-room game that has a single puzzle - escape from the room in which you have inadvertently trapped yourself. This is largely a set-piece to unleash the awe-inspiring power of the Large Machine itself, and to sort out what your various options will provide.
In solving this game I found it necessary to replicate much of its logic in programs of my own to provide a more sensible search space, but even this was not enough, because the items the Large Machine generates can be transformed by other means.
In sum: very silly, incredibly complex (and breakable if you try to make things too degenerate), and probably unsolvable by the unaided human mind. I enjoyed this game a great deal, but I have an unholy love of wordplay. Everyone else, beware - but at least admire it from a safe distance.
1-9 of 9