Lomalow

Baf's Guide

You're on a hiking trip, and a rockslide deposits you at the foot of a cliff, near a strange house with some even stranger inhabitants. The storyline is complex and reasonably well developed, but the implementation needs a lot of work--essentially, you advance the plot by asking the characters about the same topics over and over and over, and if you're lucky, they'll furnish a little more information each time. They're also rather cardboard--they don't react to obvious stimuli. Since those characters, and the story you wring out of them, essentially constitute the entire game, struggling with them makes the game pretty frustrating. The hint system (on which you're likely to rely a good deal) breaks down toward the end of the game. Intriguing at times, but uneven.

-- Duncan Stevens