Creatures by Andreas Hagelin
A choice-based puzzle RPG sounds like it could be exactly my cup of tea. Unfortunately, there were a couple of things that made it impossible for me to enjoy Creatures. First of all, there’s the interface. For some reason, Hagelin has chosen to present the text in such a way that it wraps character-by-character, rather than word-by-word, leading to situations were part of a word is on one line, and part of it is on the next. So you have “the opposite side of the roo” [hard return] “m.” I found this incredibly irritating. Furthermore, gameplay consists of navigation through an extremely convoluted set of text menus. I don’t mind the menus too much as such, but they lack essential quality of life features. For instance, even if you know that “I” stands for inventory or “P” for map, you will be unable to type them until you have first returned to the main menu. Every action you have taken also requires a useless Enter before you return to a menu where you can actually do something. Going from one room to another costs, I believe, three commands, whereas there is no reason to have more than one (as other text adventure systems). So playing Creatures just feels very slow!
I managed to explore several rooms and encounter an enemy I clearly couldn’t beat yet. Stuck, I checked the walkthrough, and found that I had to open a door using what seems to be a very underclued puzzle. (Yes, the words one, three and five appear in the description of the mural, but so do many other words. It might have helped if I had been clued into the fact that I was apparently looking for a numerical code.) I then found some equipment, and was actually looking forward to trying out the combat system again. But trying to equip the armour fatally crashed the game twice, so I ended up being unable to move on.