Beneath the Exhibition
This one has a very slick presentation!
I think it’s a custom system? It’s not one I’ve ever seen before, and the file structure doesn’t look like Twine. These are always a risk, since it’s very easy to build a mediocre custom system, and very hard to build a good one. We’ll see if this one lives up to its good first impression!
Unfortunately, the interface doesn’t seem to like my screen being wider than it is tall. The huge margins at the top and bottom, plus the status bar on top and the hints on the bottom, mean I can’t fit much text in between. This is exacerbated by the fact that the text pane scrolls to the bottom every time new text is printed, so I have to scroll up to figure out where the new content started.
Presentation aside, the game is off to a promising start! I’m a blind university professor giving a lecture, with a diligent but somewhat exhausting TA (six hours of office hours a week, wow!). All descriptions come in the form of sounds, shapes, and textures, paying attention to what I would notice and what I wouldn’t (I can’t see the student standing there, but I didn’t hear him walk away; I know where all the museum display cases are, but not what’s inside them). The first puzzle involves reading Braille. That’s a very solid hook (at least for me with my love of academia). It could perhaps have been done in fewer paragraphs and with fewer pauses, but even outside a comp structure, that intro would make me keep playing.
Unfortunately, there’s a lot of friction with the playing experience itself. New players might be willing to type GO NORTH instead of NORTH or N every time, but I keep typing the short version out of habit and have to go correct it. A “press space to continue” every time you enter a room or LOOK keeps breaking my rhythm. Moments like this:
> x desk
It’s a sturdy wooden desk. The top has some deeper scratches but it already looked like that when you bought it years ago. There’s a table calendar on the desk’.You discover something hidden inside.
…turn what should be an exciting reveal into guess-the-noun confusion. What did I discover inside? The game never says! When I notice a discrepancy between two copies of a document, I’m clearly supposed to ask my sighted TA for help:
Maybe Iris can tell the difference if you compare the two versions you have now.
But ASKing IRIS ABOUT either of them gets a chipper “I don’t think I know anything about that, sorry!” The solution is to COMPARE X WITH Y, which I only figured out by looking at the full list of verbs.
I finally got stymied when examining something in the room description turned up only blank lines.
Elara Voss and Iris Wilson are in the room with you.
> x elara
> x voss
> x elara voss
So I think I’m going to save my game and stop there for the moment. The premise here (a blind professor and her very excitable TA searching for a treasure potentially buried behind the wall of the museum) is fantastic, and I really want to see where this goes—and I don’t want the joy of the story to get buried under the annoyance of these little problems. If (and I hope when!) a new version comes out, I look forward to playing it through to completion!
(The punctuation is also a bit of a mess (many missing periods, quotes where they don’t belong, etc), and the verbs can’t decide if they’re supposed to be present or past tense, but I come from a long line of proofreaders so I notice those things immediately. It hasn’t caused any problems with understanding.)
Tutorial
This one doesn’t really have an in-game tutorial. When you launch the game, it pages through a non-interactive introduction: an explanation of how to play, what commands might work, and what to do if you get stuck. There’s good information in here, including some uncommon commands you’ll need (like EXAMINE ROOM), but I’m not sure I’d call it a tutorial so much as a help text.
There’s nothing wrong with that, necessarily—that’s how Infocom did it, with their printed non-interactive manuals. But in 2026, I would like the information paced out a bit better. Since many of these commands (I suspect) won’t be needed for a while, I’m afraid I’ll forget them by the time they’re first relevant.