IFReviewed by
Andrew Plotkin on 2006-07-01 04:38
This worked better -- at least, I got a fair distance in.
I like the plan: write a game based closely on the mythology and culture of the Miwok (a West Coast group of Indians which I had never heard of). Truth is, as the hack wrote, stranger than fantasy. And the story, as it starts to unfold, does have a realistically alien feel to it.
The setting, on the other hand, is realistically kind of dull. Everything seems to be laid out in a diorama, complete with kids running around playing realistically dull games. The copious footnotes don't help any. I mean, they're all interesting, but they add to the feeling that the history lecture is far more important than the story.
(Yes, I know, reading footnotes is optional. Doesn't help.)
Maybe that feeling would have shifted once I got into the heart of the story. I couldn't, so, well, there it sits.
The implementation is incomplete, as well as buggy. Lots of unimplemented objects and missing synonyms. At least two descriptions are interrupted by "(...)", which the author obviously intended to fill in later. (Hint: pick some string like "$$$" or "-FIX-" that you know will never occur in the finished version. Use that for such bookmarks. Before you release your game, scan all the source for that string.)
