IFReviewed by
Andrew Plotkin on 2006-06-25 08:55
There's a pacing problem here. I felt like I was, er, hit over the head with an ending when I least expected it.
You're sent out with little explanation to find some mysterious artifact someone dug up. That's it. As you explore, you find a small part of a strange underground realm... only, as I said, the game ends just when I thought it was starting to go somewhere.
There's a storyline, but it only shows up in fragments at the beginning and end. Mind you, this wouldn't be so disappointing if the game hadn't started to go somewhere. It does, really. There's stuff underground; enough to hint that interesting things are happening. Then they don't. Oh well.
The implementation is careless (missing rtrue statements, inconsistent capitalization in room names, object names which include the article -- "a a key"). These are all fixable with a bit more Inform experience.
By the way, one complaint which is not specific to this game: if you're writing an Inform game, do not put linebreaks or extra lines of text in your "Constant Story" line! That constant should contain only the name of your game as a string, nothing else. Why? Because the verbose/brief verbs print the Story constant followed by "...is now in verbose mode." Or whatever. It looks really silly if there are extra linebreaks there.
