Okay, I thought to myself, I’ll do one more today. Technically I have two hours, but with this one I stopped after about one.
It’s a whole lot of puzzles without too much context, which is not really my thing. I guess it would be wrong to say no context, since it’s established my protagonist has a wife and son, though that seems to be mostly to get a cheap pop out of a ‘having to kill an illusion of your son’ puzzle.
I could just say that a really puzzle-heavy game like this isn’t quite what I enjoy most, but what bothers me about that on top of this is that things outside the realm of the puzzle in question don’t seem to be implemented much or at all. For example, in a room titled “The Puzzle Room” (quite descriptive that one) there are some items on the table – a knife, a sheet of metal, a whistle, some chalk. The solution to the room is to get the knife, put the sheet metal under the door, and use the knife to poke the key in the keyhole through to the other side and catch it on the metal. You don’t use the other two items. But the room cued me, perhaps as a red herring, that there was a key embedded in crystal somewhere in the room. I thought blowing the whistle might crack it loose. But the game didn’t accept ‘blow whistle’ or ‘play whistle’ or ‘put whistle in mouth’ or ‘sound whistle’ or just ‘whistle’ or anything I could think of.
I kept returning to the walkthrough on this one. I played with the card puzzle a bit on my own before realizing I never wrote down what cards I was shooting for, and the mysterious puzzle dungeon-master wasn’t going to repeat himself, or at least by any command that I could figure out. I guess I’m in the last room, so I could restore my most recent save and just enter the walkthrough commands by rote…
Well, after doing this, which is fiddly, I face down a snake. I can either be persistent and die or walk away from the quest but if I do it wishy washy it the game doesn’t like that. Creative solutions aren’t really allowed… I took the flagstone from the coin room, because it just ended up picked up on a ‘take all’, but I can’t bash the snake with it, and this crossbow I’m carrying is out of bolts. And my sword wasn’t persistent.
Eh, so much for that. It didn’t seem buggy and the grammar was fine. The riddles were probably a little too clever for their own good but I can see this appealing to some.
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