City of Secrets

5 star: (49) 4 star: (44) 3 star: (7) 2 star: (2) 1 star: (0)

Average Rating: Number of Ratings: 102 Write a review

- Brian Campbell, October 21, 2007

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.

Recommended.

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Baf's Guide

Possibly Short's most polished work, and that's saying something. In a city based on both high technology and magic, trains and robots and illusions, an innocent traveller gets swept into the center of a clandestine power-struggle which will forever change the city and how it is seen. Excellent world-building, not just in that the environment is highly explorable and implemented in great detail, but in that the city has a distinct foreign-metropolis-through-tourist-eyes flavor, and a history which makes itself known in various and subtle ways. Good sense of choice: although there's basically only one ending, much of what happens along the way is variable. Uses the conversation system from Pytho's Mask: a combination of menus and ask/tell that's sensitive to context and lets you change topics arbitrarily. Even though most characters will respond to a wide variety of topics, it's still easy to run out of things to say. Features a "novice" mode, but the standard mode is recommended for anyone but the absolute newcomer to IF.

-- Carl Muckenhoupt