Played to completion?:
NoRating:
5House or Office:
House, sorta. Not really, though, I guess.This game is set in space! But it still manages to spend a lot of time on your bedroom and hallways! Grr sigh. Oh well. Better than some I could mention in the recent past, though.
Unfortunately, it is plagued by a number of small but irritating misspellings and mis-usages, such as "arial" for "aerial". By an also-cruel twist of fate (this time the fault of the Comp02.z5 randomizer), it also happens to have a number of the exact same puzzles as the foregoing game.
But never mind all that. I was slogging along bravely, albeit with the walkthrough, when I came to the RANDOMIZED MAZE.
This is not fun. I have better things to do with my life. I quit here. I will note that I would even have played through a maze if it had been straightforward enough to have a one-thing-works-every-time solution in the walkthrough.
Moral of this story is that Emily is cranky and mean, I suppose. But really, please, so much of this stuff has so been done before, it drives me insane with boredom. Doesn't anyone have an innovative setting or puzzle system or SOMETHING?
Look, I don't know, maybe I'm missing something here. But I don't think this has to be that impossible. Play a bunch of other games. Familiarize yourself with the puzzles, and the settings, that have been done to death. And then don't repeat them unless you really, truly have a new twist. Just find something else to do. Pick a different time period to work with — lord knows there've been lots that have hardly been treated at all. Play with a new genre. Or go ahead and do another science fiction game, but make the science fiction aspect of it go deeper than a little chrome plating and the robot NPC. There's such a richness of possibility out there that it makes me sad watching real implementation effort — and I discerned that a fair amount of effort had gone into this game, though apparently not much time with a spell-checker — seeing all that yoked to the service of puzzles that have been done before.
Anyway. Sorry. Not all of that rant was really directed at you, Mr. Rissman, whoever you are. I was actually even liking this game better than several others here, until I hit the Random Maze. It's the trend that I'm ranting about.
