Ratings and Reviews by Floating Info

This is quite the flawed game: the writing is at times filled to the brim with similes and metaphors, many confusing, there is frequently a huge amount of text between commands (more than a page even), and there is a lot of waiting and talking (the conversation system is just typing TALK TO PERSON repetitively). You are often forced to perform actions you don’t want to, but in a “there’s nothing else you can do in the scene and the game is stuck until you do” way rather than in a more effective Rameses style. Long descriptions are often not cut down when seen a second time even when it feels natural that they would.

I ended up being "out of the game" pretty quickly, spending most of my thought on noticing the issues in the writing and gameplay rather than feeling I was actually in the game and feeling any of the emotional tugs that were attempted.

However, this feels like a good game to see what you shouldn’t do. Unlike some other games labelled the same, some of the issues in Condemned seem to be things I could actually see myself doing if I wasn’t careful and hadn’t played this game and noticed why said things don’t work. Thus if you are a budding IF author like me I would recommend you try to play this game, especially if you are doing parser in particular.

Even despite all this, I’m quite surprised that this game has gotten so many one-star reviews, even from those who seldom hand out one-star reviews. It doesn’t feel to me like a one-star game at all, both in my personal opinion and in my perception of what games that tend to get a lot of one-star reviews from the community are like. The game is playable, decently implemented and has structure: it just doesn’t have much else good.

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This game is composed of a set of completely linear, self-contained puzzles: your goal, in a nutshell, is to solve puzzles in order to get through each and every obstruction preventing you from going west.

Now, none of the puzzles really stood out. There was one that was way, way too similar to a puzzle from Andrew Plotkin's The Dreamhold, and another one involved a very vaguely described board game being played, which totally broke the immersion for me. The magic system never really added much to the game: it was just there to provide an extra obvious move for you to do before continuing on with a puzzle. But, these puzzles may be great for people who are still getting used to IF.

But, this game is saved enough to get three stars from me by the very impressive atmosphere. There are very, very few (if any) objects or locations in this game that I didn't have a detailed picture of in my head, something that I cannot say even for many of my favorite works of IF. The atmosphere also gave a strange feeling of emotion that I can't really describe in my review and must be experienced through the game to understand (assuming it works on you).

I think this is a good game to show people getting into IF, and a good game to study if you want to think about describing your world. But, for puzzle design, it isn't impressive.

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