The Shadow in the Cathedral

This formerly commercial text adventure game really goes to great efforts to ensure its accessible to its target audience (of schoolkids). You will be subtly nudged, quietly coerced and gently goaded towards the correct commands to proceed. There are almost no red herrings, explorable areas are tightly constrained, and there is no death. If that's not enough, invisiclues and maps are also available.

It's a shame, then, that the story cannot quite live up to this excellence of execution. A fascinating setting, where Newtonian mechanics has become a religion, is squandered in service of a dull villain-steals-a-macguffin plot. Your character, a low-level clock mechanic, gives chase, explores the Steampunk city, solves some puzzles along the way, that's it. It's rote Harry Potter level stuff. It's the first part of the aborted "Klockwerk" series, which will never see the light of day since the company shut down, so it has to do the grunt-work of introducing people, places and concepts, without any of the pay-off, thanks to its cliff-hanger ending.

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