IFReviewed by
Andrew Plotkin on 2006-06-25 10:14
I wanted to like this, but the accumulation of annoyances eventually did me in. I liked the gizmos and the gizmo puzzles, but...
Annoying inventory limit, and the sack object also has an inventory limit, which is even more annoying. In a time-limited game, you spend half your time picking up and dropping things. Or going back and forth fetching them.
Too many conflicting synonyms -- more commands require disambiguation than ought to. (Having a "plastic tube" but also two others objects that respond to "tube", for example.) (There are far too many "box"s in another location, for another example. And one changes arbitrarily from glass to plexiglas. Sorting out what's what in that room was just a fog of wrongly-interpreted nouns -- bleah.)
In one location, as far as I could tell, you have to refer to an object that has not yet been mentioned in the game. Without the hints, I couldn't have solved this.
In the endgame, you have an absurdly strict time limit, and the critical objects aren't in scope until you examine their container. After tenth time I died, restored, and had to type "examine", I gave up and looked at the hints. But there are no hints. So I just gave up.