cobaltnine | IFCOMP 2008 - Cry Wolf (Reply)

This was potentially interesting, but failed. I did not play much longer than my hour, as the final 'event trigger' to end one of the scenes was a stupid piece of guess-the-verb and at that point I was sick of GTV.

I felt pretty good solving one of the initial puzzles, but there were some verb, noun, and general implementation problems that bothered me.

I should note that I've been playing with Inform 7, and one of the first things that occurred to me was that Inform 7 probably would have caught one of the issues with similarly-named items. There are potentially six bottles you could be juggling at once, and five of them are named. But of you are only carrying one bottle, a named bottle, and refer to 'the bottle', it assumes you want the unnamed one and says you don't have it. This was pretty frustrating, as the name was not an English word and thus was kind of awkward to type out.

Secondly, there is an openable item that it would be nice to know the contents of. I don't think it's a container, although I didn't try putting anything in it, but you seem to use up the contents. x item does not list the contents the second time, unless you close and then re-open it. Why?

There is a very handy and natural verb that is not implemented for one of the puzzles in the first act.

There is a broken table in the second(?) act, (the Transportation Table) and the way the car acts is pretty unnatural. There's a lot of hand-holding while the car is in motion, but in order to make the car go, you have to talk to the passenger. There is no hint that this is the way to progress - something like 'Suzy looks restless' every few turns would have been nice - and I relied on the (admittedly well-done) hint menu to finish up that scene.

In the third act, I knew there was a surgery scene coming up. I'm not squeamish for description; I just didn't want to deal with what terms I'd have to think up to get through it. My hour was up in scene two, when I voted, and this didn't change my vote any.

Final score; 4