And now we have this year’s sole work in TADS. Spoilers follow the break.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Honestly, this game feels like a first draft. You’ve got the bones of a short work in the vein of Myst<\/em> and not much else. It starts with the PC alone at a standing stone on an island with nary a word of introduction. You make your way through a series of obstacles. Most of the obstacles are mechanical, but one of the first consists of stabbing a madman bound to a post, with about as much text or consideration devoted to the act as in this sentence. The ending wraps things around in a Twilight Zone<\/em>-ish twist: your doom is sealed, your life tied up in a temporal knot. You are<\/em> the madman, as well as a corpse found underneath a temple nearby. I guess this explains the general lack of context, but only after the fact. The twist actually reminds me a bit of certain aspects of Trinity<\/em> when I think about it, but Trinity<\/em> gave me more of a reason to care.<\/p>\n I personally had some problems with the ending. See, this game is almost entirely linear — solve a puzzle, proceed to the next puzzle — but the final action requires an object from a much earlier section. (In fact, you take it from that corpse under the temple, which means it’s time-looped.) Speculation on my part, but I think I probably would have thought of going back there if the structure of the rest of the game hadn’t convinced me that going backwards was never necessary. As it was, I had to consult the “walkthrough”, which is actually a command that embeds hints in the room descriptions. That’s an interesting little variant on the old-fashioned per-room hints resulting from the HELP command, as in the Scott Adams games. I’d like to see that aspect explored further.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" And now we have this year’s sole work in TADS. Spoilers follow the break.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[84,53,548],"class_list":["post-2527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-if","tag-if","tag-ifcomp","tag-ifcomp-2012"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2527"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2527\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2528,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2527\/revisions\/2528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}