IFReviewed by
Andrew Plotkin on 2006-06-25 09:10
The chilly-government opening is fun, although the idea doesn't go anywhere we haven't seen before. The game winds up being rather less surreal than it starts out. I was disappointed, although it's a perfectly acceptable prison-escape caper.
Lots of alternate solutions, which is nice. (Although, of course, not detectable to the player until you cheat.) I wound up looking at hints a lot. But I felt bad about it afterwards.
A twist on the menu conversation system -- you actually type what you want to do, but in imperative rather than literally ("claim circle is a square", "ask why not"). The game is still prompting you with the list of options you can use. Weirdly, this is more comfortable to me than the standard menu. Possibly because some of the options are actions which you might fail at -- you can't "define square" unless you have learned the definition of a square. So the conversation can involve more than trying every option... although trying every option is exactly what I did.