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7 people found the following review helpful:
 a sense of place and time, May 19, 2010by G.D. Lascelle (UK) As other reviewers have said, the strength of CoS is the atmosphere of its setting. Though the author may have conceived the City as part of her own fantasy world; for me she manages wonderfully to capture the unmistakeable ambience of a middle-european capital during the later cold-war era. There is a polished, and almost luxurious veneer, but underneath, everything is curiously shabby and archaic. As the title implies, this is a city whose social structures are founded on lies and secrets rather than anything more substantial and enduring. Even the NPC interactions reflect the careful tones and phrasings of people living with the knowledge that everything they do and say may be observed. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Remove vote | Add a comment
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9 people found the following review helpful:
5 Stars, February 10, 2009by Anjka (Trieste) Exciting. Wide. Involving. Freshly written. Well structured. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Remove vote | Add a comment
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22 people found the following review helpful:
Impressive as a setting, but in need of more plot to accompany its backstory, September 2, 2008by Jimmy Maher (Oslo, Norway) Emily Short's longest and perhaps most ambitious game, City of Secrets wowed me completely for the first hour or two I spent with it. The plot has you, a rather naive tourist, arriving in a large city for the first time. Your sightseeing there is quickly complicated by a mess of conspiracies and counter-conspiracies that you discover. You must sort out what is really going on, figure out who are the real good and bad guys, and finally choose a side to support. While doing all this, you also get the opportunity to explore the City and learn something about its culture and history. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Remove vote | Add a comment
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4 people found the following review helpful:
No secret: I liked it., October 18, 2007by Tom Hudson (Durham, North Carolina) Plot, atmosphere, and worldbuilding are all excellent in this Emily Short piece. I found it refreshingly easy - and in hindsight there seem to be two solutions to many of the puzzles - which let me could concentrate on exploration. Despite taking lots of time to explore, I didn't think it was as long as some other reviewers report - a bit more than competition length, perhaps, but not an epic. I found two puzzles undercued or miscued, one of which left me stuck enough to go to Usenet for an answer. (The other puzzle I didn't solve, and just accepted a sub-optimal ending.) Unfortunately, there's also enough time pressure on your interactions with the principal NPCs that they don't seem as fully realized as some of Short's previous efforts, the supporting cast don't connect as well as they need to for the penultimate scene to work for me, and the last scene was a rather unconvincing explanation for me, with an apparent total change of genre; there's one hint that I might have missed some explanation of what was going on, but if so it wasn't foregrounded. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Remove vote | Add a comment
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