The Tempest

Baf's Guide

An adaptation of the Shakespeare play by one of the latter-day demigods of IF. While ample intelligence and creativity went into the making of the game (unsurprisingly, with Graham behind it)--the parser is completely hacked to make all the responses Elizabethan--it doesn't work very well as a game. You get long chunks of the play as cut-scenes, and the game amounts to figuring out what to do to trigger the next cut-scene--but some of the actions are so obscure that having the text of the play on hand doesn't help. Worse, you can't speak to any of the other characters, since that would presumably violate the confines of the play. The Elizabethan responses are amusing, but they're probably the best thing about this game.

-- Duncan Stevens