OT, but:
Does the gameplay change when you get inside the college? Because I was recently inspired to start it by the IFDB reviews and the puzzle for getting inside the college filled me with rage. Massive spoilers under the tag.
Finding the loose cobble and figuring that you needed to throw it at the bird to get a feather to tickle the don wasn’t bad. But then… a puzzle-critical object that is in your own handbag is hidden from you until you hand the handbag over to an NPC. To distract another NPC you have to do something not thoroughly obvious and use the “person, do this” syntax, which I always hate. And then… having done the obvious thing, you lose the game with no warning on a three-turn timer. And in order to avoid this you have to time your actions precisely to something that’s going on somewhere else, so that basically the only way to discover the timing yourself would be to stand at one location pressing “z” and recording the cycle, then going off to the other location and pressing “z” while counting turns on your transcript… and then the action that you have to take succeeds for reasons that are basically impossible to predict, given that up till now the main feature of the policeman has been that you can’t get away with doing stuff while he’s watching. And every time you try something and it fails, it’s about ten turns before you can try again.
Is this an exception, or is this the kind of puzzle I can continue to expect? Because several times I’ve started up some classic of the 90s and the opening act contains something that I’d never be able to solve myself without copious note-taking, trying everything on everything, trying to go directions that aren’t mentioned in the room description, timed deaths that drop you in unwinnable states that you can’t undo… (thinking specifically also of the opening of Jigsaw and a bunch of the first act of Losing Your Grip). Is it just that I’m not going to enjoy 20th-century IF without a walkthrough, or that these games haze you at the beginning? In this case I didn’t see the forgiveness that I was expecting from the reviews – in some ways it’s forgiving in that you can usually recover without making the game unwinnable, but it doesn’t seem like there are multiple solutions here.