Wow, I had planned to just peek at this before we head down for movie time. I'm exhausted and shouldn't be starting a game, but figured another text adventure, meh, probly randomized deaths in a silly fantasy world--or a mystery I wouldn't care about solving? Meh. But right from the start, I saw this had a lot of attention to detail, good Sound, advanced Look, an elaborate parser, tied to Demon's Forge a text adventure I love, and actual moving animations o.O haha

Look: 8/10 Whoa and indeed, it's much more like Enchanted Sceptres/King's Quest/point and click/menu-based games than a text adventure. I was way off!

Wellll, I take that back--the Look is a bit deceiving. It is, indeed, a text adventure game. At least, the way I was able to get it to work appropriately and didn't want to use joystick to move around the cursor. Regardless, I love the menu vibe like the Load game Save game buttons, reminding me of the earliest point and click adventure/s on Mac. And over and over I was happy with the Screens' Looks

And omg that cute inventory in the upper right

Play: 8/10 It starts with such excitement! The beginning puzzles were so logical and like a thriller, escaping ah! As cool as the Mac style screen was, it wasn't really all that utilized. But what a deliciously excellent parser! And I love that it has that classic feature, which I had mostly seen in early Apple II graphic text adventures, where you can hide the graphic so you can read more of the text. This can be helpful often, and should be a fundamental feature in all graphic text adventures imo!

Feel: 9/10 So grateful there's no random deaths, and even tho the chase scenes should have stressed me out/been a negative, they added such a thrill to the game I couldn't dislike them! Like, that's how a mystery thriller segment in a text adventure should be--not just RNG-based "oops the crooks got you" out of nowhere, instead "omg run, oh shoot something you can hide behind--do it!." Touche!

Attachment: 8/10 Usually I cannottttttt click with the mystery-solving type text adventures--give me treasure collection or sci-fi puzzle-solving or else! Haha. But this one just had such a unique setup; a well-done Look; an immediately engaging plot with an actually doable mystery (with the help of a Solution, mind you); and elaborate but not overly-long text segments.

Welp, after 4 different play sessions (and many breaks in between just because I was into OSRS combat achievements ugh, but the thing is, I didn't enjoy a second of them... why do I keep playing parts of oldschool runescape that i don't like... I need to just stick with afk while I do my backlog!) and a few give-up-and-look-at-the-solution moments, I was still enjoying the game as I saw this ending screen! A good length to this imo!

This may not be a favorite genre (mystery text adventures), and how often I replay text adventures in general is questionable--but this is decidedly my favorite of the mystery-type text adventures so far--and a lot of fun to play! Give it a try!

Completion: 100% Playtime: ~1h 45m