Reviews by Levi Boyles
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Fun and funny, September 8, 2011Great game. Most puzzles involve doing things that seem like the right general idea but whose actual effects are not really predictable (ie well hinted wacky game logic). Not my style of puzzle but it really fits the context of this game, and it is done well (it is usually not hard to guess what to do next, with one exception early on for me) so on the whole I like it a lot. I found one relatively small bug which allowed me to temporarily circumvent one puzzle: (Spoiler - click to show) by throwing the jig out the round window in the study (trying to get it through the outer window in an unlikely attempt to get it outside), the character did not "forget" how to play the jig and I didn't need to solve that puzzle to get the copper key. Later, (after saving and restoring maybe?) I did not have the song "memorized" anymore, and so needed to go back and solve the puzzle, and I had to look at a walkthrough since I wasn't entirely sure there was a bug at that point . Other than that, I did not need to refer to a walkthrough, which is testament to a quality game in my book.
OK, not great. , August 3, 2011Overall pretty good, but it has some issues. The beginning is rather confusing until you really sit down and look at the in-game map. You can easily skip important items without realizing and be destined to a "failing" ending. In my opinion, this is just bad game design. To require repeated playthroughs through entire sections of the game for one small mistake made earlier is not interesting or fun. My largest annoyance was that (Spoiler - click to show) (pretty big spoiler ahead) (Spoiler - click to show) the box (containing some gum, a very important item) was mentioned among a bunch of items, whose description hinted that they were not important. It was a time-pressure situation so I ignored it and later needed to restart from an earlier save to get it. You should be able to trust the narrator! Even the hint system does not suggest that you've missed something . However, the game is generally fair; you don't lose the game at every mistake.
There are a few bugs in the descriptions (ie saying something is south when it is really north), many item descriptions are flat or are the default "you see nothing special about...". The game contains a cipher text puzzle, and (Spoiler - click to show) while in-game sources hint at how to solve it, translating the text is nothing but tedious.
Excellent, July 18, 2011Brilliant game. The puzzles are generally harder than those found in many of Emily Short's other games, but are still reasonable. I found a rare few of them "unfair" or inconsistent with what I thought was the game's logic to that point, but these puzzles (or one example in particular, the (Spoiler - click to show)blue door puzzle, (solution spoiled within: )(Spoiler - click to show) doors in the light still affect their sister doors in darkness, so there is no real reason to believe that the color of light illuminating a door will affect its link. The other colored doors are always linked regardless of the light shone on them. Yet somehow colored light is enough to fix the broken link. ) might have been easier for those more familiar with the history of IF than I. The vast majority of the harder puzzles are highly stimulating and very clever, and the story is engaging and entertaining. I hope to see more from the Lavori d'Arcane universe in the future!
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