IfComp08: A Date With Death
Apparently the third installment in a series in which the protagonist, a king, dies and is ressurected a couple times. Anyway, in this IF, Death comes by and announces that you're going to die by midnight and your job is to find a way to avoid it.
I should first note that my experience with the game was plagued with bugs due to running it on Spatterlight. Adrift games frequently have issues on Spatterlight, but I'm not sure there's a better option on the Mac. Anyway, timed scenes were often permanently broken by my going into the help system and NPCs occasionally disappeared randomly. This wasn't really the author's fault, but it probably did color my opinion of the game a little.
Aside from that problem, it felt like a fairly solid game. Mostly, it's a day in the life of a king, with some political intrigue (in the form of a menu-driven meeting system in which you make decisions after hearing from advisors, plaintiffs, etc) and some regular IF elements (like wandering around the rather small castle, looking for a way out of getting killed.)
Throughout the game, various traps and assassins try to kill you. This seems a bit at odds with the fact that Death is coming for you no matter what (in fact, >WAIT FOR DEATH is the easiest way to end the game), even if you manage to defeat every attempt. You're even given a supply of bodyguards, each with some minor personality traits, who throw themselves in the way of many dangers. And if you get them all killed off or die through some other event (such as in a meeting with deadly 'tests'), you're resurrected.
This is sometimes amusing and sometimes annoying, and while the hints suggest a better ending if you avoid dying too often or getting too many bodyguards killed off, I found the whole thing a bit uneven and somewhat uninspired. After all, the King himself isn't particularly interested in not dying, so why not just >WAIT FOR DEATH on turn 1 and be done with it?
Additionally, some of the puzzles felt totally arbitrary. In the very first room, going in any direction but one causes a huge weight to drop from the ceiling, crushing a bodyguard. There's no indication that this will happen, and searching the room does not reveal the weight's presence. The only reason I knew the weight could be avoided at all was a direct hint in the HINT system. Likewise, it's not really clear if it's even necessary to go to any of the meetings, though possibly their value is revealed at the end and I lost interest.
6/10. Solid, but not really exceptional.