Unease

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My major problem with this game: too much seemed to be going on, and I didn't understand very much of it at all. There is a fantasy setting -- maybe -- except that some of the objects appear to be technological, rather than magical, so perhaps it is really an odd piece of SF, instead. There are peoples and individual persons with strange Fantasy Names, many of them at a time, whizzing past my head in conversations I only nominally exert any control over. There is conspiracy, disguise, revelation, a blatant pass from a serving wench, all crammed into a couple of moves, before I have had a chance to really get my bearings.

Then I wound up locked in a cell and drunk; the hints didn't give me enough information to figure out how to rescue myself from this problem; and after enough turns of swaying to and fro in drunken abandon, I gave up.

Again, the basic problem is that I know too little to be able to guess what my goal in the game is-- even in the short term, I know I want to get out of this cell and rescue my friend/girlfriend/potential lover/whatever, except that I have no clue how to go about this or why I was even locked up in the first place. Character involvement is also not deep enough, because I understand too little of what's going on with my PC to care a great deal about his dilemmas and desires. If I had a sufficient understanding of my goal, I might find it easier to keep playing; if I cared enough about my PC, I might keep going despite the difficulties. The combination of problems is what made me stop.

There might be something interesting going on here, but so far all I can really tell is that things are Weird. More time on the establishing material might have helped.

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- Tom Hudson (Durham, North Carolina), April 25, 2008

Baf's Guide

A representative of the SciFi/Fantasy genre with a somewhat vague plot, and a slight erotic touch (well, it's slight by modern standards, a few decades ago it'd probably be considered the purest porn). Contains several really atmospheric pieces (in particular, the depiction of dazed conditions has been the author's success). The puzzles, however, aren't as good: the object intercommunications aren't always clear, at least one solution would never have worked in real life, and I suspect I was able to finish the game by using an "illegal" way at one point. The built-in adaptive hints are helpful in most cases, yet they don't give away the final solution, and aren't always available when you need them. Also, there're a couple of bugs, although nothing fatal. With all these issues, it's still definitely worth playing.

-- Valentine Kopteltsev