At the very beginning, Amnesia claims to be made up on the spot. Judging by its quality (or, to be more precise, by the lack of it), this might be true. The plot and puzzles are nonsensical, and the tissue of the story is "adorned" with lots of misspellings and a few bugs. Sure, the game is spoofing itself, but here, in my opinion, self-irony doesn't help much; in fact, it even fails to increase Amnesia's rating by a single star.

Rating: *

Reviewed by Valentine Kopteltsev (06 Dec 2004)

amnesia.gam (72.04 KB)

TADS executable (competition release)

walkthrough.txt (604 bytes)

walkthrough

A mystery that made me dream of how wonderful our world would be if all criminals were like the murderer in this game: their utter inability to hide or destroy crucial evidence would make the work of the police so trivial we'd soon have them all locked in. Only one thing overshadows this idyll somewhat: the vision of Agatha Christie begging on the church-porch. Speaking seriously, while Murder at the Aero Club certainly would fail entirely as a detective story, it doesn't necessarily as a text adventure. Some of its aspects are quite amusing, and the puzzles are logical, although not outstanding. Considering its shortness, this work could be put into the "mildly recommended" category, although you certainly don't need to be Sherlock Holmes to beat it.

Rating: ***

Reviewed by Valentine Kopteltsev (06 Dec 2004)

AeroClub.z5 (105.50 KB)

Z-code 5 executable (version: 1)

walkthrough.txt (2.51 KB)

solution

There are enough games in the Archive, which deserve a rating of 1, but which I have rated one star higher just because of a single feature that I found amusing. This is not the case with Happy Birthday, Yoshi!: it's surprisingly well-balanced. Sure, the plot isn't too fancy (you just have got to find a birthday present for your friend Yoshi), but at least it makes sense. The game has got a rather limited two-word parser, but the overall game structure and the selection of puzzles provide for it never really getting in the way. The puzzles aren't the most advanced ones, but one couldn't call them illogical, either. To put it short, HBY! honestly works off its rating, and maybe even does better than that, although it's still a bit too meagre for three stars.

Rating: **

Reviewed by Valentine Kopteltsev (06 Dec 2004)

yoshi.zip (91.52 KB)

MS-DOS executable (version: 4.0)

The main idea of this game is, before starting writing anything (be it a novel or an adventure game), the author should learn how to properly use the main tool of the trade - namely, the language. Since this postulate is brought home to the player not always by means of humane methods, it's recommended for the player to possess a sense of humour, a tolerance to critique, and the ability not to take her/himself too seriously. Some of the people also might be scared away by the rather unusual puzzles (one of them, for instance, represents none other than a grammar test), and some railroading. Those who decide to play Carma despite the aforementioned issues, will be rewarded with great graphic effects of highest quality (the word "effects" is an understatement; I'd call this work "a semi-graphic adventure", rather than a "text adventure", or even "illustrated text adventure"). Also, a couple of episodes were real masterpieces, which I'm never going to forget.

Rating: ****

Reviewed by Valentine Kopteltsev (25 Dec 2004)

carma.blb (10.69 MB)

Glulx executable (version: 1)

hints.txt (2.52 KB)

hints

terps.txt (2.29 KB)

list of compatible Glulx interpreters