Game Reviews

Lethe Flow Phoenix:
A Flight of Fantasy,
release 2

review by Stuart Beach

Set in a refreshingly far-off, sometimes mystical environment, Lethe Flow Phoenix has a number of satisfying, not-too-difficult puzzles and some interesting NPCs. The game's highly metaphorical plot and screensful of explanatory background material, however, made it difficult for me to get really drawn into the setting.

As the game begins, your character (a woman, incidentally, although this seems pretty arbitrary) has headed off on a solo camping trip one Halloween for some soul-searching and contemplation. Awakened by strange noises, you venture into the night and accidentally pitch yourself over a cliff. When you awaken, you find yourself in a grassy field, left both to discover how to maneuver about this completely unfamiliar environment and your purpose here. The game reminded me a little of "The Sound of One Hand Clapping" in terms of some similarities in tone and style, and I wasn't surprised to see that game listed in the credits as the author's favorite work of IF.

I'll admit I was at first put off by the timed how-to-avoid-dying-of-starvation puzzle that begins the game, the kind that crops up in so many text adventures. There are a couple of fatal endings to the game -- for example, walking off another cliff or carrying around a hand grenade after removing its pin -- but none that seem unfair. Overly cautious players may miss some important information, however; for example, for much of the time I played I avoided exploring desert areas for fear of dying of thirst, although I still think that that's a reasonable assumption to make.

Lethe Flow Phoenix really contains only about a dozen or so puzzles in terms of getting around obstacles or obtaining the objects you need to overcome an obstacles. Experienced players should be able to progress most of the way through the game, if not complete it, in the course of a few hours of play.

I really liked the scoring system used in Lethe Flow Phoenix. Instead of informing the player that a certain number of points are awarded for solving a puzzle, the game states how many "major goals" and "minor goals" the player has solved, identifies what each of those goals are, and tallies what percentage of the total this constitutes.

Examining every object and studying room descriptions were extremely helpful for figuring out what to do next. The object descriptions were probably the best guide for how to implement each item. I really didn't experience any "guess-the-verb" problems that sometimes come up in trying to solve IF puzzles.

There is a help command, but the only hints included in the game are fairly general and there are no explicit spoilers. There are a couple of NPCs who will answer questions posed to them, but each has information about only a few limited objects (in my experience, at least). I found it a little frustrating to try to elicit information from these characters, especially because you have only a few turns to ask one of the NPCs any questions. Some more explicit hints would be good to include for beginners.

The game is small in terms of number of rooms, but feels much more extensive with the sudden, concentrated onrush of background material and character development in the main part of the game. While the game's title is explained in a READ.ME 1ST document, the background information necessary to understanding the game's goal is only introduced once you've progressed past the game's beginning section.

I did run across a few technical difficulties in running the game. Two versions are available on the GMD site -- one using the file i/o features available in TADS 2.2 to read and write to a file for saving options from game to game. Unfortunately, neither TADS file would run on my Mac, although I was able to get the game to run on a PC. Like so many text adventures, this release had several bugs I ran across that would not be difficult to re-code. For example, at one point I generated a TADS error. At another point in the game, giving the command LOOK UNDER BUSHES resulted in my picking up everything that was under said bushes.

While I was a little disappointed with the game's story development, I did enjoy the puzzles and the NPCs, especially the garden beasts (who seemed like something out of Disney's "Fantasia"). Although I found the story a little rough, I'm looking forward to seeing future games from this author.

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