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Excellent Concept, Uneven Execution, May 13, 2011Bonehead is an interactive exploration of an historical moment and it's clear the author invested time and care into the game's design, but it's hindered by some moment-out-of-time scenes which may be more jarring than illustrative, puzzles both cliched and obscure per the subject matter, and in my case, an inability to defeat my apathy toward baseball minutiae.
I wanted to enjoy it because I think empathy and the ability to learn from a time and place are great strengths of the IF medium (and I'm still firmly on the author's team, as it were), but having to participate in certain character interactions felt like a chore, there came points where it's necessary to perform specific unintuitive actions using unfamiliar language (the bag situation, specifically), and while the early puzzles were straightforward (distract Person A to retrieve Item B), the walkthrough carried me through the awkward final stage which I felt was unplayable otherwise.
Baseball aficionados or historians may feel differently, and there are two deeper and altogether more complementary reviews available by Emily Short and Jimmy Maher at the time of this writing. For the rest, there's always Wikipedia.