Frankenfingers
Charles Moore
This game had a charming premise, a ton of effort put into making all major descriptions rhyme, was filled with logical puzzles, and mostly failed to work for me.
There were several pain points, and while none of them were particularly egregious, collectively they served to mostly push me out of fully engaging with the game. You start off with an inventory limit of one, because (duh) you’re just an animated hand. So far, so good. Later you need to carry multiple items and get a sack… but the game doesn’t do inventory management for you, and if you use something from the sack, you’re very likely to drop the thing you were holding without realizing it. It was a little extra knowing that all the author had to do was designate the sack as a ‘holdall’ in Inform, and it all just would have Worked Out. This meant that for the entire game, a puzzle I had already solved (‘how to carry multiple items’) had been solved, but I still had to deal with it, over and over and over again. At one point I lost an item and literally had to pull up my transcript to find out where I had dropped it.
The second thing that didn’t work for me, sadly, was the rhymes. I was impressed at the work that went into it, but few of the rhymes scanned very well, and more importantly, it was tremendously difficult for me to pick out the important information when revisiting the room (items and exits). And, well, this feels like me being ridiculously picky, but who exactly is doing the rhyming? I tend to think of the room descriptions as the internal monologue of the player, but our protagonist in this game didn’t particularly seem the rhyming type? We’re just a common villager, right? I think if I had liked the rhymes more I wouldn’t have cared, though, so I dunno, ignore me.
The third thing that didn’t work for me was the spacing of the puzzles; it just seemed like there were a lot of ‘padding’ rooms that only served to draw things out and make me forget where on the map I was. This was mitigated by the fact that much of the map was labyrinthine instead of maze-like, making it harder to get lost… until there was an actual fork in the path, and I’d miss it. This was made more finicky and frustrating once we got to the ‘horse’ part of the game, where the horse acted like a slowly-moving roomba that you had to explicitly turn in 45-degree increments. That in and of itself would have been fine, the first time you encountered it, but there’s a few puzzles that will very probably make you re-traverse a very long path several times with the horse, and having to read the rhyme room descriptions to try to find the exits, then remember which direction you’re coming from, then working out which way to turn the horse, time after time after time was just kind of exhausting.
And again, the whole thing felt very unfortunate, because I liked the spirit of the game, and I wanted to enjoy it more. No one thing would have been that big a deal. And I enjoyed solving the puzzles that I figured out! And I do have to say that the ending scene did pull me back in a bit, and make me go ‘aww’.
Did the author have anything to say? They had a lovely premise to share, though not much more of a message other than ‘mad science bad’.
Did I have anything to do? Solve some fun puzzles, but also get bogged down.