IFComp08 Review: Berrost's Challenge
This one needs a lot of polish and a moderate amount of redesign. There's just something terribly wrong when the only way to get the ranking of "accomplished mage" is to never cast any magic spells ever. The blurb said the game included some tips of the hat to Enchanter, but I was really much more reminded of Wishbringer. The moral doesn't translate - being a mage is not the same thing as being a spoiled princess or a hapless postman.
A better design that wanted some kind of "hidden message" should have set it up so that magic was better, but that it couldn't always work. (For added fun, one could structure the puzzles so that every puzzle is solvable by magic, but the dependencies are such that no one playthrough could solve everything with it.) As it stood, even when I wanted to use the spells, they rarely worked anyway.
It also was not remotely clear enough that I started with spells. Really. You spent all this time implementing a bunch of systems, both good (magic, important sound effects) and bad (hunger, sleep, finance), and then you defanged all of them so that they were almost entirely pointless. More could be done here. In fact, more could be done with what's already there. Like I said; redesign.
Most of the necessary polish comes in in raw interaction. There are far too many weird syntaxes mandatory where basic ones don't work. If you tell me that something is just out of reach when I try to get it, but I might be able to snag it with another handy item, then it's true that > SNAG X WITH Y should work. And it does; hooray. However, > GET X WITH Y had better work too, and it never does. A few puzzles had obvious but unimplemented alternate solutions; in particular, it seemed straightforward that I should be able to drop the broom down to where the golem could safely find it, but I found no syntax that would accept this.
Also, this is another game where the developer fails to terminate the program properly in victory, instead just printing out a "you win" message and leaving you to wander around. For added fun, the various refusal messages imply you still haven't finished the challenge. Learn to use your tools, programmers. This is really basic stuff.