IFReviewed by
Andrew Plotkin on 2006-06-25 09:54
This game has a terrific sense of atmosphere and prose, a medium-good sense of plot, a weak sense of pacing, and a lousy sense of actually being finished.
I really enjoyed the absurdly floofy first chapter. The second chapter didn't seem to have much to do with the first, and I didn't gain much confidence that it would hang together at all. The storyline does come together more after that, but it goes in a number of different absurd directions, and I wasn't quite convinced.
Unfortunately the last bits were full of unpatched seams -- the game may work right if you stay on the intended rails, but as soon as you try to do anything else, you get inappropriate daemon messages, skipped segments of narration, and crashes.
Even the walkthrough is buggy, for heavens' sake. I managed to get nearly to the end, but the last move is either unobvious or broken, so I didn't see the ending.
Nonetheless, the game has good writing and a solid sense of what it's supposed to be, which is worth a lot.
The conversational responses don't track game events very well. You can ask a character about something before he tells you about it, and the resulting text doesn't make sense. (Try "ask aloysius about stranger" too soon, for example.)
(Debug mode left on in competition release.)