[IF] Blue Lacuna

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I finally finished Blue Lacuna.

Which is, I think, the best piece of interactive fiction I have ever played. Some of the reviews I saw (like the--bizarre, from my current point of view--review in SPAG) made me think that it might disappoint in the end, but it didn't.

Now I'll have to go back in and try to understand how it works; and those who expect me to write something more about it than the blog post will not be disappointed. (Deo volente, of course.)

One question I want to ask right now, though, is this: both SPAG en Emily Short talk about a maze. What did I miss? I didn't encounter a maze in the entire game, and I apparently visited 131 out of 129 locations. (Maybe it only exists in puzzle mode?)

Comments

  1. Emily Short6 April 2009 at 02:25

    I believe we both mean the portion in the jungle area, surrounding the beehive. It's not a maze in the classic sense, in that the rooms aren't completely identical, but they are similar and they do have odd and asymmetrical exits. So they do work as a maze in the sense that they make the player work harder to navigate.

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  2. Victor Gijsbers7 April 2009 at 12:53

    Hm, ok, but those are only about 10 locations, all of them with different names, with no hidden exits, and most of the non-symmetrical connections are explained as you take them. ("The path bends around almost completely...")

    It slightly irritated me because it made my map look ugly, since I didn't have enough clues to put the rooms in the right place when I first entered them; but it never confused me about where I was or where I could go. So it doesn't seem to qualify as a maze?

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  3. Emily Short7 April 2009 at 14:55

    YMMV, I suppose, but I found it pretty confusing, and it was the first time that the game forced me to map instead of being (on the contrary) very friendly about tracking locations.

    It really seemed out of place with respect to the location and puzzle-handling of the rest of the game (which I was playing in story mode precisely because I wanted to focus on the narrative).

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