IFReviewed by
Andrew Plotkin on 2006-06-25 09:49
Well-named. Each bit is well-written, but I wish they all hung together better. The few scraps of continuity, reprises of one scene's background in another, work so much better than the one-shots. I wish the game had had a lot more of that.
As it stood, I was reacting to each scene on its own. Some I liked, some I didn't. But I didn't feel like much was building up over the full course of the game. So I had no reason to care about the scenes that didn't grab me.
The response to "inventory" is "Sorry for all you pack rats out there, but there is no inventory command in this game - and neither is one needed." Okay, but "examine me" gave me an inventory listing; it's ingenuous to pretend you can't do it. Since the game-help specifically recommends "x me" as a way to get oriented, perhaps "i" should map to the same command.
(Having finished the game, I still think this is a good idea. It would fit in just about every scene. "Look" and "inventory" are reflexive commands; when they don't work, I feel paralyzed, which is distracting.)
The status line always has "/n/t" appended. I don't know if this is a bug in the game or the TADS 2.5.4 engine -- it could be the MaxTADS shell, but I don't think so.
Sheesh, if the text refers to "the long cold thing", I should be able to type "examine long cold thing".
Generally doesn't give enough credence to standard IF commands, even when they're appropriate. In one scene the game suggests resting, but "wait" is not a synonym for "rest". More attention to synonyms, when variant terms are used in the text -- "mines" for "mine", for example.