Letters from Home

Baf's Guide

Half interactive fiction and half Games Magazine extract, Letters From Home is strewn with challenging wordplay puzzles, among them collecting all the letters of the alphabets (disguised in various forms) and solving cryptic crossword clues. Packed with subtle humor and IF references, so there's fun to be had even if cryptic crosswords aren't your thing. Some of the puzzles are a bit obscure, but on the whole everything works impressively well.

-- Duncan Stevens

>VERBOSE -- Paul O'Brian's Interactive Fiction Page

Graham Nelson once described interactive fiction as "a narrative at war with a crossword." Letters From Home takes a definite side in this battle by being an interactive narrative where the main goal is to complete a crossword, and whose entire purpose is structured around puzzle-solving, the "crossword" part of the metaphor. The explicit connection with that metaphor is just one of the many pieces of Nelsoniana scattered throughout the game. From the introductory text, to the Jigsaw (grandfather clock and Titanic mementos) and Curses (sprawling mansion filled with relics of distinguished ancestors) references, to the somber traces of wartime, the whole thing comes across as a loving tribute to Graham. Being a Nelson admirer myself, I couldn't help but be impressed by the various clever nods to him peppered throughout this game.
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Vexing, June 30, 2008
While the game takes place in a serene country house being emptied by genial removal men, the player doesn't interact much with the plot or setting on a mimetic level. Rather, they wander about converting things into letters.
While the wordplay-saturated atmosphere was quite pleasant, it wasn't enough to keep me from resorting to a walkthrough after my first encounter with the time limit.
Completing the game without the hints would require multiple playthroughs, a certain amount of trial and error, and, most likely, a bit of research. When a description is curiously specific but the cultural or scientific reference escapes you, I wouldn't hesitate to resort to Google- some of the answers aren't to be found in-game.
I'm tempted to recommend this one for those who enjoy difficult cryptic crosswords, but the game lacks the structural fairness of that standardized form. The items and the letters into which you convert them do not have a consistent relationship.

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