Now this was pretty cool, a sort of Steampunk fairy tale told from the eyes of a little girl who seems to be dreaming it. I’ll spoiler-cut the rest just in case.
Your character here is a little girl. She has a white rabbit on her skirt, so for a second I thought I was due for another Alice in Wonderland story, but this actually seemed to have a unique setting with a steam train and a city full of robots. I like that; it’s much easier to simply reference a story than to write your own, though this one did have some shades of Alice and the Wizard of Oz in it in part. Emily Short says it reminded her a little of His Dark Materials, and I definitely got that vibe too.
A big thing that this also has in common with The Golden Compass, along with a child protagonist and a steampunk setting, is that it just sort of ends in the middle. It seems to be part of a much larger and unfinished story. I would say as an intro, it’s quite effective, but it’s sad that it wasn’t a self-contained unit. Perhaps it’s just an epic, grand thing that would be too long for a single comp game.
A nice touch in this game is that you seem to be dreaming, but in the dream, if you “sleep” then you get a snippet of the real world, which doesn’t seem so bright and cheerful for our protagonist. To return to the adventure, you “wake.” This is implemented a bit strangely, with inventory items, but seems to work out OK.
There is also an NPC helper that you can carry with you, Hal the Robot Frog. The game is pretty fair about cuing you about things you can Ask Hal about, so that’s nice, though the method you use to get him is a little odd. I didn’t read the walkthrough, as I found the game more or less puzzle-free, but I got Hal by typing “Hello, Hut,” at which point it said I was talking to Hal (without explaining yet who Hal was).
Also, it seems kind of weird that I just walk off away from the Robot Queen, but I can’t talk to her and it’s not immediately clear that she’s a hostile entity.
Not perfect. But it has potential.
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