I spent a while wandering around the map until I got lost, without running into much that directed my efforts. I had an unsatisfactory encounter with the bartender, in which he did not respond to any of the standard NPC commands for opening a conversation. I got frustrated trying to get my document out of my briefcase, because of the arbitrariness and goofiness of the things that stopped me; I got even more frustrated with the game's daemon reminded me the third or fourth time that the executive order was in there. I knowthat, I just can't get at it!

By the time I concluded I didn't know how to solve the opening puzzle, I was too bored to bother going through the walkthrough. I know this is the most horrible of condemnations for an author to hear, but that's how it is. The game didn't look particularly buggy, but it wasn't implemented with enough detail, the structure wasn't clear enough to motivate and give me goals, and the writing was fairly bland. I think I might actually enjoy a politically satirical game (well, maybe; depending on how it was written), but I spent most of this one wandering around confused and apathetic on a map I couldn't keep track of. I guess that might be some sort of cryptic statement about the state of democracy today, but...

Internal Documents Awards

19^th place on the 2003 Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (9th Edition).