I'm not the ideal audience for this one, because while I am not opposed to fantasy genre games, I rarely enjoy those which style themselves after RPG scenarios.

Threnody exudes authorial good will and seems technically adequate -- in a few respects, more than adequate. I appreciated touches like the enhanced status bar and the magic self-updating map.

On the other hand, the setting, and the writing that described it, disappointed me. It struck me as fairly stock fantasy material, the author not having given a lot of time to developing his world as a place with its own history and character. And once or twice -- as when the passageway collapsed behind me -- I had the impression that he was trying to apologize for having just relied on a tremendous clichŽ. This almost never works; if you realize that one of your plot mechanics is overused, better to take it out and replace it with something more interesting and more specifically suited to the story.

I played about a hundred moves before losing energy and interest. Points for accepting >FIAT LUX as a command. But the bottom line is that it takes tremendous writing skill to get me to accept a talking cat without rolling my eyes.

Threnody Awards

3^rd place on the 2005 Spring Thing.