by TheBrain » Fri, 12Apr06 15:05
Finally finished it, and I have to agree with most things said before in this thread. (some SPOILERS ahead)
First of all, playing through the game requires an incessant amount of clicking. Especially the rotating through a room just doesn't add enough to be worth all the extra effort involved, not to mention that it's very unintuitive if you don't realize it's a possibility. The same goes for the large amount of items, for example I must've examined/tried to pick up the spices 4 times before I finally could (and once afterwards when food was mentioned). And even then picking up the pepper was just a bit of dumb luck, at no point did I think "oh, I need to create homemade pepper spray!" (of course I thought that afterwards, but then finding all the other ingredients was just incredibly laborious).
I also had the same experience as ExLibris with the shop... It all makes the game very frustrating to get through, even more frustrating if you simply miss a step (like examining the bottom of the coin and then not seeing it opened another option in that menu). I understand the need for some flavour items, but I feel other RAGS games have done this much better.
Secondly, I don't mind that the story is entirely linear, but when it's so prohibitive to the progress at the very least you should add something like a "Current Goal" option as a reminder (or clarification) of what you're supposed to be doing. I very much dislike artificial roadblocks like "there's still something you need to do", with no prior clue towards the fact that there's still something to do. In most cases I'm quite elaborate in trying to do everything with the current scene, then it's very annoying to find there's some obscure objective left (like taking a picture... Seriously, that should be an option on the item you want to photograph).
I'm sorry I don't have much better to say about your game, but I feel I just spent a couple of hours on a half an hour game, that's just not enjoyable to me.