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A well-deserved first-place winner in the 4th annual Interactive Fiction Competition, this once again proves Graham Nelson's prowess as modern-day IF master in the true spirit of Infocom. After taking the player another imaginative spin on the Zork mythos. The game's prose is at a very high level of quality, its world is very well-designed, and several aspects of the documentation (the context-sensitive hints and the diplomatic "briefing") were very well done indeed. I didn't get through the entire game in the two hours [required to play each game in the competition], and I found myself resorting to the hints quite a lot. Often, this was because a logical puzzle had me stumped, but the first two times were due to puzzles which didn't offer enough alternative syntax. Unfortunately, these two situations inured me to looking at the hints, thinking perhaps that my other obstacles were due to syntax problems as well. Apart from this one flaw, Sherbet was a truly excellent piece of work - well-plotted with clever puzzles, a strong sense of unfolding narrative, and rife with the pleasures of revisiting an old friend in a new context. |
