Anyway, sorry. I just don’t have much to say about this.

Gleaming the Cube

In short, everything works! It’s wonderful. Except that I really never had a chance to do anything other than the story written by the authors. For some reason, it didn’t work for me. Totally subjective. I guess after going to all the trouble to learn how the virtual environment works, I wanted to be able to have some degrees of freedom. Instead, I’m just on rails — whether I throw the ship off, whether I kill the robots, etc. we still get to the same ending. Some slight variations in the foliage on the way there, but ultimately the same destination.

Why this works in a Photopia, and not in Rover, beats me. It’s just how it is. This game will get good marks from me, and presumably from many others, but it missed the sweet spot for me.

Rover’s Day Out

Interactive fiction is lively more or less only when the world appears even somehow plausible, if objects and environment can be manipulated for the sheer do-ability of it. If there’s a chair, let me sit in it! If there’s a torch, let me hold it (I understand, in retrospect, why the torch couldn’t be held, for the sake of the central puzzle, but arbitrary limitations like that annoy me). SQ features a spare environment, full of objects that are more or less off-limits. To its credit, the most annoying objects that aren’t manipulatable (see above, torch) have something to do with the puzzle landscape of the work, and I’ll give it some credit for that.

I managed to get through this game in about 20 minutes with the non-complete score (I have to admit, I appreciated the ridiculous implausibility of the last 8 points, since it completely affirms what I wrote in the previous paragraph — if you can arbitrarily interact with the environment, then hide stuff where most players are unlikely to look, as long as those things are unnecessary to the completion of the game), but I needed a partial hint on the final puzzle (once I found the object, I figured out how to use it without further help, although I misunderstood what it was for at first).

So, this game is not great, has 0 replay value, doesn’t really inspire with its puzzle design or writing. As a quick, escape-from-a-cave lunchtime diversion, it probably does its thing, but I generally am looking for something with a bit more oomph, either in the story, puzzle, atmosphere or writing department.

Finally, the use of ‘!’ when announcing that you’ve found something gets old kind of fast. Ecstatic announcements aren’t really necessary. Grump grump.

Spelunker’s Quest

I’m embarassed to say that I didn’t figure out the central puzzle without looking at the walkthrough. I blame myself though – I was doing too many things at the same time.

There’s really not too much else to say about this one. It’s reasonably well-written, reasonably well-implemented. It’s a single-puzzle game, finishable in about 3 minutes, once you’ve oriented yourself. In the world of ‘casual gaming’, it rates as a great lunchtime distraction. As anything more than that, well, why does it need to be more than that?

If you don’t like puzzles, or only like hard puzzles, or require story or motivation or plausibility or anything like that, seek your fortune elsewhere. If you’re looking for a cute bit of text-game fun, load it on up.

Byzantine Perpective

The premise of the game is that you can manipulate your environment by means of a magical ‘runebag’, which permits you to ‘knock’ letters out of word or ‘cast’ them into others. For instance: “knock brain” might turn a heavy ‘brain’ into heavy ‘rain’, or maybe just heavy ‘bran’, and “cast p into pro” might turn a ‘pro tennis player’ into a ‘prop tennis player’. You get the idea.

So far, so good. It’s a good premise for a puzzle game. However, the more I played, the more I could imagine the authors wracking their rains, er, brains, in order to come up with logical, grammatical puzzles that made any sense whatsoever. And not necessarily succeeding. The situations suffer a bit from a sort of arbitrary surrealism, and offer no particular motivation to solve the puzzles, other than curiosity about what might come next. In several places, you might not even realize there’s a puzzle, except that you’re stopped by an invisible force until you’ve solved whatever the authors think you should be solving.

Along the way, you’re offered a number of hints as to what you could be doing, via the numerous figures you’ll encounter as you move from space to space in the game. Mostly, though, you just have to keep ‘talk’ing to them until they run out of stuff to say. Which is kind of boring and not particularly satisfying. I’d prefer to assemble the outline of the puzzle at hand from hints in the environment, rather than be vaguely spoon-fed insinuations of potential directions to act in.

But therein lies another problem. Once you get finished with the initial levels, you enter a level featuring a) difficult puzzles — ok, ’sea ions’ into ’sea lions’ wasn’t rocket science, but ‘crown’ to ‘crow’ to ‘cow’ isn’t at all obvious from the context, with b) a turn-based time limit, after which your poor sea ions, er lions, have drowned and you’re informed by the (very good, +1 for this) lower pane ‘interior monologue’ that you probably should have saved the poor things.

At that point, I consulted the walkthrough, realized the “error” of my ways, and saw how difficult the end of the game is, given the timing constraints and realized that, lacking some insider knowledge of how the world should appear at the end, with little guidance, there was no chance in hell I was going to complete this game without simply typing in the walkthrough, so I stopped.

Plusses: the game is well implemented, I couldn’t discover too many unimplemented objects (although there are plenty of potentially ‘knockable’ and ‘castable’ objects which remain immune to my runebag’s powers). The writing is pretty good, and I particularly appreciated the ‘interior monologue’ pane, which, although sometimes a bit too drollish, offered a nice running commentary of what I was doing.

Earl Grey is not bad, it’s just too hard, without enough effort put into guiding the dear reader through what appears to be an open, exploratory game, but is, in fact, a very strict puzzle with a fairly unique, abitrary solution.

Earl Grey