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Semi Intelligent Design

by Andrew Dean

2009

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(based on 1 rating)
1 review

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Number of Reviews: 1
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1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
"Semi-intelligent" is right, February 4, 2024
by Lance Cirone (Backwater, Vermont)

This game was one of the two entries written for the fourth 24 Hours of Inform contest, in 2009. I'm not sure what the deal with the game is, because it seems like two totally different things in one and might not be possible to complete.

In the first half, you work as the housekeeper of a very cranky Senator and have to serve him soup for supper. The puzzle here has some pretty odd implementation: stirring the kettle gives you a message that seems like the soup is ready, but the powder remains. You actually have to pour the boiling water into the cup first, then put the powder into that and stir it. Due to an oversight, you can earn an infinite amount of points by repeating certain actions, and your score is given "out of 0." Also, it's described that a garden is to your west, so I tried to see it, but I got a "you can't go that way" error. To be fair, I did enjoy the sequence where you get bored waiting for the kettle to boil.

Once you serve the soup, the Senator gets mad due to your choice of cup and flavoring, which you presumed he liked. He goes in to attack you, and suddenly the game cuts to something completely baffling. You play a different character locked in a dark room, whose mannerisms and speech bring some kind of ogre to mind. You have to do tough labor to earn your soup. You have a cage with a lump in it that you can't drop or do anything with or else the Senator yells at you for mishandling "testing material", and on the other side of the room is some snarling beast that attacks and kills you if you open the wall. There's also a "special cage" that apparently you can put things in to change them, and the game tells you to clean it, but nothing happened when I did. The soup is stuck on the bottom of the cage, and you can't meaningfully interact with it. I also got a blank message when I tried pressing the round button in the other room. It's a frustrating experience, and it felt like I had exhausted all my options and wasn't getting anywhere.

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