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evil.txt
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Where Evil Dwells

by Steve Owens and Paul T. Johnson

Lovecraftian, Humor
1998

About the Story

A few short hours ago you were in your private investigator's office sleeping- er, concentrating hard on your work when a frightened young girl named Elizabeth came to you with a sinister tale.
[--blurb from The Z-Files Catalogue]


Game Details

Off-Site Reviews

>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction

Where Evil Dwells is subtitled "A Creative Differences Production", and the billing is apt. This is a story that doesn't know what it wants to be. It starts out in Gritty Detective mode: you're a grizzled private eye, brought to a creepy house by the tale of distressed young girl. However, once you get into the house and roll up one of the rugs, you are confronted by dust bunnies who "glare accusingly at you." Say what? This is not a metaphor. The dust bunnies are implemented as actual, animate creatures. Oh, OK, so this will be a supernatural twist on detective adventures. But wait. In another room, you find a series of collector's plates depicting "scenes from Samuel Beckett's lesser known children's play 'Waiting for Godot to Finish Up in the Bathroom So I Can Go.'" Well, that's just plain silly. When this picture is combined with the article you find on "getting ectoplasmic residue stains out of linen", Evil starts to look like a Ghostbusters-style comedy with, uh, detective influence and, er, maybe a strong inclination towards silliness. But perhaps not, because once you get into the forest, you might find yourself in a "broken and bloodied heap" facing an "impossibly large behemoth", shivering while "true horror sets in as it leands [sic] its malefic head through the gap, its eyes fixed intently on you." Wow, horror. You don't expect broken and bloodied heaps in Ghostbusters-style comedies. That's what the whole game is like. Its tone staggers drunkenly from one room to the next, sometimes from one response to the next. Some rare works can actually pull this off, bringing all the disparity together into a harmonious whole. Where Evil Dwells is not one of those works. Instead, the differences undermine each other, and every time a solid tone gets established for the story it is promptly squashed by whatever comes next.
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SynTax
This is not a huge game, but it was quite fun to play, and there were one or two quite tricky puzzles. [...] There were one or two glaring bugs, none of which
stopped the game being finished, but did spoil the effect somewhat.
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Page Update History

  v.6: 06-May-2022 00:40 - Paul O'Brian (Current Version) - Edit Page - Normal View
Changed external review links
v.5: 06-May-2022 00:39 - Paul O'Brian
Changed external review links
v.4: 20-Mar-2013 05:20 - Edward Lacey
Changed external review links
v.3: 12-May-2008 17:31 - Paul O'Brian
Changed external review links
v.2: 11-Mar-2008 23:55 - David Welbourn
Changed description
v.1: 16-Oct-2007 01:48 - IFDB
Created page