My initial reaction, when I realized what this was about, was a kind of sinking feeling in the gut that here was Another Generic Office. But no. This one has enough attitude to make the setting interesting again.

Unfortunately, partway through the game the actions became obscure enough that I had to resort to the walkthrough; there are several things I would not have thought of doing without its guidance, and several other things that were definite guess-the-verb situations. The game also violates one of my cardinal rules of puzzle design — you want to accomplish x, so you have to do y, which is completely unrelated and simply happens to result in x for unexpected and unpredictable reasons.

Still, I definitely enjoyed the feeling of Evil Power — never less than when I was able to put the boss just where I wanted him. I wish that several of the puzzles had been more intuitive and provided more parsing options, because I think I would have enjoyed this game a great deal more had it been possible to play it all on my own native wit.

BOFH Awards

26^th place on the 2002 Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (8th Edition).