At Wit's End

Baf's Guide

You're a baseball player thrown into a series of wacky mishaps. Strong storyline--this is one IF game that can't be dismissed as an excuse for a bunch of puzzles--but the puzzles themselves vary a bit in quality. The more complicated ones are also highly frustrating, and it's pretty easy to get something wrong without realizing it and to have to backtrack. Still, the writing is good, there's all sorts of funny stuff around the edges, and the story itself is wildly improbable but no less fun for that. One of the year's most entertaining entries.

-- Duncan Stevens

>VERBOSE -- Paul O'Brian's Interactive Fiction Page

Sometimes, in its fervor to crank up the puzzle intensity along with the story intensity, the game overloads certain puzzles, thrusting them into the Babelfishy realm of the ridiculous. One puzzle in particular, probably the most byzantine of them all, really strained the bounds of believability for me... This quibble aside, AWE is an excellent piece of work. The writing, though nothing special, is serviceable, and the coding is really outstanding. The game notices and comments on lots of little things, which really deepens immersion, as does AWE's thorough implementation of all first-level nouns. The best part, though, is the plot. At Wit's End has one of my favorite plots of any competition game from this year, one that kept surprising me even after I had figured out to expect the unexpected.
See the full review

SPAG
AWE gets off to a rollicking start with simple, tight, timed puzzles, but then goes much too broad and much too hard, at least for my tastes. While all the puzzles seemed reasonably logical, but the breadth meant a lot of time pursuing irrelevant alternatives, and the difficulty would have required an awful lot of player time to solve without excessively relying on hints/walkthroughs, which I was unwilling to do.
-- Sean T Barrett
See the full review

SynTax
It appears to be well-programmed although very hard in places and nigh-on impossible to solve without frequent use of the save/restore/undo feature.
-- Dorothy Millard
See the full review

- View the most common tags (What's a tag?) (Log in to add your own tags)

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

Average Rating: Number of Reviews: 3 Write a review

Juuuuust a bit outside, May 21, 2019
I really wanted to love this game. Thrown into the middle of an at-bat during the American League Championship Series, it has one of the better hooks I've seen, and I honestly would have played an entire baseball game coded by Sousa. Ultimately, however, this game can't decide what it wants to be and it left me deeply frustrated.

The first third of the game is well above average, as the first several sections are tense and well-paced. It has the feel of spy movie with exotic locations and contrived danger. But then came the barn.

Even if I could look past that a complex, multi-step puzzle feels entirely out of place in this otherwise frenetic game, the way it's coded is aggravating. At one point you must pour liquids into containers using a funnel, and you have to individually unscrew each cap, insert the funnel, pour the liquid, remove the funnel, screw on the cap, and repeat. And that's just one example of how the game needlessly complicates basic tasks. None of the puzzles are terribly difficult; they all make sense within context and the game will often push you in the right direction if you're on the right track. But there's...just...so...many...steps. Heaven forbid you have to restore back to an earlier point and redo the entire barn puzzle (yeah, that happened).

There's also some sloppy coding. Sometimes doors are described as closed when they're open. There's a door entrance that's apparently its own room, but only while going in one direction. And some fairly obvious synonyms are not programmed. But in other ways it's coded really well. With one or two exceptions, the game will let you know if you try to save in an unwinnable state.

I honestly feel bad being the only person so far giving this game less than three stars. There's a lot to like here, which is why I finished it despite my frustrations. But At Wit's End left me feeling as much.

Fun, although not without flaws, October 19, 2007
In AWE, you are Jake Garrett, who plays center field for the Boston Red Sox. When the game opens, you are up to bat, and--of course--the game rides on your success. The first puzzle is fairly well hinted, I thought. If you fail to get it the first time, you do get a second chance, which is nice--and even losing is interesting: the message is "You have failed to be a hero"; very nice. Another interesting thing that I didn't notice until a couple of scenes in is that replacing the usual score display in the upper right corner is an emotion display, which changes as does your situation, and dependent on your solution of the puzzles.

The game did a good job of pacing and keeping the player motivated through the first few puzzles, and they were easy enough to solve without needing to load saves--sometimes, perhaps a little too easy, but only a little. As well, the writing was reasonably good and the story sufficiently engaging to keep me interested.

However, it wasn't without flaws. In the middle of the game (and the game is short--easily solved in a half hour if you don't get side-tracked) there wasn't quite enough hinting, I felt, to indicate which part of the puzzle I ought to be approaching next, so the game felt rather slow as I stumbled around trying to figure out just what should be done. As well, there was a puzzle whose solution was to eat; it was noted earlier that you are diabetic, and there are messages insisting that you are hungry and need to eat, but the food is just right there in the refrigerator, so it felt like nothing but a distraction.

But those are minor problems; removing the eating puzzle and tightening up the mid-game a bit would be easy and would answer most of my complaints. Unfortunately, there were several unintended random features that made the game annoying. A couple of items just kept disappearing from my inventory for no clear reason, which was frustrating. Also, after completing the game, I checked the walkthrough to see what the optimal ending was; but there was another bug that caused the optimal ending to be impossible to achieve unless you worked around it--I had to examine a person twice after completing the final puzzle, or the game proceeded as though I hadn't completed it.

(This review refers to the original competition entry. The bugs mentioned may have been fixed in the later version, but I have not checked.)

An entertaining but deeply frustrating game, July 16, 2017
This game is named appropriately, for two reasons.

First, it's about a series of unfortunate events. After a bright opening, the game quickly devolves into tragedy after tragedy. The writing is funny and fresh, and the situations made me laugh.

Second, though, the biggest section of the game is incredibly frustrating, with inventory limits, hunger puzzle, liquid measuring problems, etc.

I recommend playing through the first part, then using a walkthrough or the club floyd transcript.

Related Games

People who like At Wit's End also gave high ratings to these games: