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Excellent puzzle-fest, June 28, 2008If you don't enjoy puzzles this game is definitely not for you. Luckily I do - it's what got me into IF and it's what I enjoy about most of my favorite games. I missed this game when it came out and hadn't played it until today when I heard it mentioned by someone else who happened to be playing it at the time.
A few criticisms about the game would be the immense amount of descriptive material and the rather odd inventory scheme. Normally having every detail of a world implemented is a positive thing, and for the most part that's true here too. But it is a bit overwhelming, especially since almost everything seems important. I actually had quite a bit of trouble solving one part of the game because I forgot about the description of a part (1) of an item (2) that was on another item (3) in a section (4) of the room (5) described in the room description. That's five (!!) levels of recursive detail - and it was vitally important to the game!
Now in fairness the game is only one room, so the author had to have quite a few levels of detail to achieve the puzzle depth that he did.
And then there's the inventory. Because there is so much stuff it quickly becomes obvious that carrying everything in the room would be impossible for a real person. So the author implemented a neat little feature where the PC automatically sets things down if you pick up too much. This is nice in that it avoids the player having to manually juggle inventory but it has a nasty side effect. In a puzzle based game it is often very useful to type "inventory" to get a list of all the items you have at your disposal to solve a given puzzle. The inventory handling implemented in this game makes that absolutely impossible. So if you find something early on in the game and can't figure out what to do with it, later when you need it you might find that it's buried in a drawer somewhere and you've forgotten that it even exits. Which means you'll spend quite a bit of time researching every level of detail just to be sure you haven't forgotten something important.
That's it for the bad. The good is really good though. The puzzles are fun. Each puzzle is clued quite well and none of them require any weird guess the verb nonsense or impossible leaps of intuition. It's all fairly logical and once you have the right pieces everything falls into place. For anyone who loves puzzles this is a rare bit of fun. Frustrating at times and certainly not easy, but worth the time. There isn't a whole lot of back story so it's sort of puzzles for puzzle's sake. If you don't like that then don't bother because the game doesn't have much else to offer. But if you do enjoy a good puzzle this game is a must play.