Esme on 17/2/2009 at 14:56

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well as you asked nicely :ebil:

Esme on 17/2/2009 at 15:15

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well I have a mission to complete that got interrupted by the contest for a start, and I have a couple of ideas for missions, it's just real life getting in the way

watch this space, it might be a while though

Esme on 29/6/2009 at 20:46

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no worries, I've enjoyed all of yours to date so I'm glad to be able to give a little back

I didn't do so well in the competition but the ones that beat it were seriously good

Esme on 29/6/2009 at 21:02

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ten minutes at a go I'm afraid

however I suddenly find myself with a large amount of time

unfortunately there are several jobs round the house that need doing before I can jump into the delights of dromed again

and I can pretty much guarantee something will crop up to take my large amount of time away which on the one hand means I still have tons to do but on the other means bills get paid

real life is a b*gger

...and I'm sure delight and dromed don't belong in the same sentence

odyseeos on 7/4/2010 at 20:43

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I played the Mission four times completely, the second time at N, the other three at E. And I experimented at some of the difficult places. I enjoyed it very much.

The real plusses, to my recollection, were intricacy, writing, and character development.

Surprising to me, authorial commentary provided some of the best stuff. Because remarks made accurate presumption to common experience, the breakage in 4th wall actually seemed to immerse at a higher level, where I would have expected an opposite effect. Such break-ins apparently were able to make use of the Garrett/1st person ambiguity effect, which is (for players) ultimately social, individual, and (I suppose) universal.

The mother/daughter relation was so well drawn that it made me unusually hesitant to max-out ko's. The two of them became rather sacrosanct to me, and that increased my feelings toward other Innocents, especially those near-by. The butler’s remark also connected that thread well.

The naming of the Guards was not as effective to me, perhaps because I couldn't go anywhere with the names. The names for guards often sounded like private authorial jokes to me, and that served to exile. Accompanying remarks to names thus worked a bit to individualize, but were something like threads cut-off.

"Peter Parker" was well-named, especially because of his position, and that KO was all the more satisfying. He was a genuine irritant.

The strongly-developed character Mr. Tulip, the crate and pharmaceutical purveyor, was memorable. So much so that his cellar hit my intuition very strongly for the secret, which secret was missing after my first play. That provision for intuition is a deep good, I think.

In general, the ideas for all the puzzles were wonderful.

On the minus-side, as far as my own apprehensions went:

Comically, I couldn't find the secret for a shockingly long time, even though I felt I knew where it was. I had finally read all three hints for it, which only served to frustrate me more. After three days of searching, it was only while I was away from the computer, idly picturing the area, that the position of the wash basin fixed in my mind. Actually, that nightmare may be because my visual system suffered some destruction recently.


It might have been a nice beat to have remarked that the guards were all on the Burrick Sniff. It was difficult for me to understand why the guards all seemed so alert in deep of the night. I would have expected a lot of sleepy jokes about Bafford’s militaristic paranoia, along with his scepter. For practical example, results of KO's on Bafford's front porch seemed unusual to me. In practice, I would get the central Sword-Guard all the way into the Butler's room before a Bow-Guard would turn and look. But then those two remaining guards would immediately go into high search/alert mode, which made little sense to me. If, however, I had been previously told that they were all on a coke variant, that it was part of the story, then heightened irritability of the Guards would not have nonplussed. Rather, they would have provided just a new sort of puzzle. Puzzlement from similar guard behavior occurred throughout. E.g, it was unpredictably surprising to me that picking up an unconscious person would inevitably lead to high alert from near-by guards, even though in silence and darkness.

Also, as an earlier reader remarked, the initial loss of equipment was unclear to me. Consequently, it was irritating. G* remarked, when he first reached for his trusty BJ, “Oh, no! I think we’re dealing with an unusually pious ghoster.”

The intricacies of the first part, up to Abernathy's shop, were so creative and well-done that I thought the second half was not as inspired. It bothered me that the art works were of no interest to Garrett, without explanation of fraud or whatnot. The titles were a lot of fun, although there was some opacity to me. Somehow, however, Abernathy and also the various guests seemed not as memorable as the previous characters. The author’s initial impetus seemed to me to be flagging a bit or to have become perhaps hurried. There seemed something removed and a bit cliche about the guests, in spite of efforts to the contrary. As if, the author felt no genuine identification with them, or affection or loathing, or that sort of thing. The card-board look at aristocrats is itself cliché and doesn't occur where aristocrats actually rule; then their lives become the only lives. Louis-Napoleon is said cardboard, but neither Louis nor Napoleon are ever pictured conventionally. And I doubt Louis-Napoleon in own relations was ever thus. Abernathy fit there, too, even though the idea of him was very attractive. Some additional quirk, perhaps in combined reflection on the confrontation with Bafford, perhaps an onset of gas byone or the other, would have gotten him out of the corral for me. But he didn't scent through to me as the earlier-threaded characters did.

I liked the combined doll idea, but I couldn’t get Dewdrop to work on Bafford’s front porch, which depressed me.

The “Featherstonehawe/Fanshaw” anecdote, by the way, was a charm to me. I happened to stumble across that, as a teenager, in an odd book called “Little Me”, and always remembered that one remark.

[Due to inexperience, I'm not competent to rate, but I'm sure the gods would rate your game as far higher than average. A problem of voting is that so much is dependent on expectation. No one reads Pearl Buck anymore, Emily Dickinson didn't win any prizes, "Gamer" rates T3 best of three.]