A strangely hostile game.
I expected a cosy mystery with the comforts of modern games. Instead, I found myself dumped unceremoniously into an enormous world (nearly 50 rooms are accessible without solving any puzzles), with very little guidance as to what to do next, no stakes-raising progression for thousands of moves, and meagre rewards for puzzles, usually just one dead-end room with a few items. The player character is as uncooperative as Rameses, refusing for instance to look behind objects even when actually moving the object reveals something, and deciding conversation topics for himself.
The interface outright mocks me: not only is it exacting about what verbs and nouns it accepts (“photograph” is not a synonym for “photographs”), even when it understands me, it demands a rephrase instead of silently accepting the synonym. Most items are nondescript, discouraging exploration. Even the aggressively bright yellow background (and the choice of an engine where the author, not the player, sets the game’s appearance), makes it clear:
The game does not want me there. The villagers, under quaint and polite appearances, want Arthur gone. The game is rooting for them, not for the player.
I’m rather a sucker for that sort of thing. It’s thrilling to enter a world, not because that world unrolled the red carpet for me, but because I earnt my way in. This pairs great with the mystery plot.
However, I think it goes rather too far. I don’t think the game could be completed without hints. For example, this early puzzle is outright unfair: a window in a recess, where the window is a critical object but totally nondescript, and the description of the recess is the indication.
I also recommend making background colour configurable: some days I couldn’t play (or had to lie to f.lux about my longitude) because the yellow is really hard on the eyes.
I’m not sure about the choice(? or engine limitation?) of listing items at the end (“Arthur saw…”) rather than folding them into the room descriptions — doesn’t seem to match the theme, and clashes with the rather flowery descriptions.
Overall, I’m glad I gave the game the time it demanded (not a small ask, given the many comp entries!), but I wish I’d been rewarded with more scenery along the way and the puzzles had been fairer.
Small disambiguation bug: x paperback asks whether you mean the photography book or the paperback book, and read paperback reads the photography book.
Typos: “It was impossible determine”, “saw rood screen”