Game 9: Uninvited - Arachnophobic Phantoms

Journal Entry 2: “This detestable house is sucking the life out of me. I fear for my brother as I have been unable to find him, or to see any sign that he is held captive within these walls. As time goes on I discover more and more rooms, all of which contain numerous items that may or may not assist my cause, but the answers seem to lie mostly within the parchments that are hidden around the mansion. They speak of a man called Dracan, who seems to be the one behind the darkness I find all around me. One such parchment directed me to a skeleton key, which allowed me to open some of the cabinets around here, but many of the items held within are of questionable use. I did however discover the box that contained Dracan’s star, and have successfully retrieved it by putting the box in the fire as another parchment cryptically suggested. If only I knew what all these items were for! I’m certain the amulet and the stars I have hold the key to finding my brother, but their purpose evades me. I have still not, despite many attempts, been able to catch the detestable little creature that mocks me constantly, but I know I must soon, as time is running out. Time…is…running…out!”

I’m going to put it out there. Uninvited is a crushingly hard game! I can’t recall another game that has made me fight so hard to achieve anything at all, only to find myself with no idea how to progress again immediately. At the end of my last post, I’d just removed (i.e. melted) the mysterious woman that was blocking my access to the rest of the house. As it turned out, the rest of the house is massive, meaning I’ve now got stacks more questions with very few answers, not to mention endless items that may or may not be useful. It’s daunting to say the least, and while any small successes I have are celebrated with fist pumps and outbursts of elation, the lengthy periods of failure and confusion that separate them are beginning to break my spirit. Am I giving up? No, not yet! But I am beginning to wonder what I’m going to do when I simply can’t complete a game, even if Uninvited is not the game that breaks me. Hopefully you guys will help me out! For now, let me describe to you my recent experiences and attempt to give you an idea as to why Uninvited is so brutally difficult.

Even fluffy, soft towels are deadly in this house

After Zenic made me aware that I’d missed a vital item (a gold amulet) on the first screen of the game (which you can never go back to), I started Uninvited again and set off more determined than ever to figure out its mysteries. It didn’t take me long to get back to where I was previously, since I’d already mapped every location I’d visited and hadn’t actually achieved very much. I then set about mapping the rest of the house and checking out all the items in each room, guessing as to which ones might have a role to play later on. One thing I did come across that I figured I could do something with was a spider on the veranda. I just so happened to have some spider spray in my inventory, which paralysed the arachnid, allowing me to carry it with me in a live state. Once I’d mapped every room I had access to, I set about re-reading the various books and parchments I’d collected to see if I could find some sort of hint about what I needed to do next. At this stage there were three rooms I couldn’t get access to (the Magisterium, the Chapel and a room off the study) and two locked cabinets (one in the rec room, another in the master bedroom), but everything else was accessible.

I did something! I actually did something!!! :) :)

Other than the book in the library that contains magic related definitions, the rest of the notes I had talked about an apprentice called Dracan, who had obviously gained too much power and become dangerous. One particular note mentioned that the house servant had stolen Dracan’s star, which I assume he required to do something with magic, and hidden it in a box that cannot be opened. Since this was the only note that seemed to contain a hint, I decided to follow it up. I looked through every room trying to find a “box that cannot be opened”, but couldn’t find anything other than the locked cabinets, which I couldn’t do anything with. I eventually figured that the small bedroom off the kitchen could belong to a servant and directed my attention there. After finding absolutely nothing of worth, I just happened to turn the light on. Now before I continue, I should mention that I’d already tried to turn the lights on in numerous rooms throughout the game, only to be informed that there doesn’t appear to be any power, so turning the lights on in the servant’s bedroom was done with no belief that anything would come of it. Well it turns out that turning the lights on makes an apparition of the servant appear in the room (don’t ask me why!), demanding to know who let me in there.

There's no power in the house except for the servants room. That makes sense!

This is one of those moments where the game gives you a glimmer of hope that you’re on the right path, and that things will start to become a bit more obvious soon. However, no matter what I tried to do with the servant, he would kill me instantly. I could see that a panel had moved behind him and that there was something in the wall behind where it used to be situated, but if I tried to move it to my inventory or even just examine it, the servant would kill me. Over the next period of time, I tried to figure out what it was that I could give to or use on the servant that might get him to allow me to get whatever the object was, but there was nothing obvious I could think of. I was then forced to use trial and error, otherwise known as click and hope, “operating” all sorts of items on him ranging from knives to axes and even matches, to no avail. Getting desperate, I used the paralysed spider on the servant, and he screamed and dissolved from view, apparently “flustered and frightened”. The game didn’t give me any information to make me think the servant might have arachnophobia, nor does this solution seem any more logical than using any other item in the mansion. It was just luck!

You know he's just as scared of you as you are of him

I’m not going to continue describing the game in this detail, but I hope the above has given you an idea as to why the game is so difficult. It’s hard enough that there are hundreds of items spread out over multitudes of rooms, and that most of these items play no part in solving the game, but it’s made stupendously challenging because the hints given to the player are simply not sufficient. You can’t really apply logic or clever thinking to these puzzles and instead have to rely on luck and an almost inhuman amount of patience. Remember how I mentioned in my last post that one of the notes hints that a chair knows where the missing key is located? Well, I’ve spent a lot of time with all the chairs in the house over the last few days, getting to know them, showering them with gifts and trying to loosen them up with alcohol, in the hope of getting this information out of one of them. The solution was to cut one of them open with a knife, as the key was hidden inside. Now that hardly follows on from the hint and as you can imagine, was figured out through frustration rather than any sort of brilliant intellectual thought. If the rest of the game is filled with these sorts of puzzles and solutions, then at some point my luck is likely to run out and I’m just going to get plain stuck.

"The chair knows where". Does it still know?

On top of all this (yes, I still have more things to whinge about!), just as in Déjà Vu, there is a time limit in which you are required to finish the game. Thankfully it’s much more generous than in Déjà Vu, but given how difficult Uninvited is, and how much time needs to be spent simply exploring, looking for clues, and trying out different possibilities, it seems an unnecessarily cruel element. My most recent save games have my character clinging to his sanity, trying to keep the demons out. I’m pretty much going to have to start again and rush through everything I’ve done to create a save game that will give me a chance of finishing the game, and will likely need to do this again at some point. Once I’ve done that, I just need to figure out how to get past the dogs at the chapel, where the diamond is that will give me access to the Magisterium, what gold and silver items are required to mix with the mercury to create a key (this is one of the hints I’ve found), what these stars actually do, and how to catch the annoying creature that constantly waves a key at me. Oh, and I haven’t found a use for the amulet that Zenic told me about either, or where and when I’m supposed to recite the magic words, if indeed that’s what they are.

You feel frustration. You feel discouraged. You feel a restart approaching.

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably getting the impression that I hate Uninvited. The truth is that it’s an intriguing game with a haunting atmosphere, and I really do want to finish it. I was looking forward to the horror themes prior to commencing and I guess it hasn’t really let me down on that front, apart from some inappropriate use of comedy killing the tone on occasion. The illogical solutions to barely perceptible puzzles are just making the whole experience unreasonably challenging. I’ve racked up five hours in total so far and since I committed to playing at least six hours on every game, Uninvited has at least one more hour to prove to me that it’s worth the effort, which brings me back to my earlier comment about what to do if and when I’m unable to get through a game on the list. I have a couple of ideas about how to deal with it, but would be interested to see what the readers think. For now, I’m going back in...

Here we go again...

Game 9: Uninvited - Conversing With Chairs

Journal Entry 1: “I’m writing in this journal in an attempt to keep my sanity. Perhaps I’ve lost it already!? My kid brother and I had a car accident in the middle of nowhere. I swear I was just trying to dodge a shadowy figure on the road and ended up hitting a tree...hard! When I woke up, my brother was gone, and then I barely managed to escape the car before it exploded. To make matters worse, I entered the only house I could see to try to get some help, and now I’m trapped here! There’s evil in this place, and whoever lives here has been dabbling in dark arts that no-one should mess around with. Pentagrams, books of magic, voodoo stuff...and I’m...seeing things! Ghostly figures keep appearing out of nowhere and some bizarre creature keeps dashing in and out of my view. I still can’t find my brother, but I can only assume he came in here too. I fear if I don’t find him soon it will be too late, so all I can do is read the various parchments left around this damn place to try to figure out what the hell is going on and where he might be.”

Well I guess it had to happen eventually! A few of you have suggested that Uninvited is a challenging game, and one that I’ll more than likely struggle to get through without a walkthrough. I’ve already played the game for over two hours and I haven’t managed to get anywhere at all, so I fear you’re right. All I’ve done so far is checked out all the rooms I can get into without dying and examined all the items within each of them, picking up the ones that seem like they might be useful. I’ve mapped everything out in Excel along with where I found each item, but I’ve not yet managed to find a use for any of the items I’ve found or come across anything that I can actually solve. The only real hints I have to go off are in the various journals, scrolls and books that I’ve picked up, but they don’t give me a heck of a lot to go off. The large book I found in the library contained definitions such as Instantum – sudden and momentary, Projectum – propulsion of an entity etc., and then was able to apply these definitions to a scroll, but all I ended up with was “talking head abraxas” and “sudden light abraxas”.

I'm afraid deep thought and research isn't working out all that well for me so far

I must have died over thirty times already, like when my car exploded with me still in it, when I was torn to pieces by a ghostly woman, when I got trapped for eternity in a prison cell, when I was poisoned by some unlabelled liquid etc. etc. The most frustrating of these deaths has to be the ghostly woman that appears whenever I open any door on the ground floor of the house. She initially has her back turned to me, but no matter what I try to do next, she turns around and rips my face off. Until I figure out what I’m supposed to do with her, I can’t access any more of the rooms on that floor, but I don’t know whether that’s something I need to do early on in the game or later. As expected, the inventory system is killing me! I put items in it by dragging them into my inventory box and letting go, but unfortunately I can only carry a few items before I get a message telling me the item won’t fit and that I should try removing something from the inventory. This problem is majorly exacerbated by the fact you can pick up just about any item in the game, despite most likely not ever needing the majority of them. I filled my inventory within about three screens, so am constantly having to manage it.

Oh great! My inventory is full and now there's a closet full of stuff!

So where am I at? Well, there’s a little creature that keeps running around waving a key at me, but I can’t see any way to get it from him. One of the journals suggests there’s a star hidden away in a hingeless box, but that they’re locked away and only a chair knows where the key is. That’s right...a chair! Well, I unsurprisingly don’t seem to be able to talk to any of the chairs in the house, so the message is obviously cryptic. Other than that, I have a bunch of masks, an enormous axe, some kerosene, a towel with blood on it and various other bits and pieces. I even have a bottle of No Ghost liquid, but when I tried to use the bottle on the Scarlett O’Hara looking undead chick, nothing happened. Oh...um...well I’ll be damned! While writing that last line, I thought I’d try the No Ghost liquid again to make sure I wasn’t making an idiot of myself. As I was doing it, I realised that the first time I tried it I didn’t open the bottle first. This time I did and she melted away like the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz. I was about to ask for a hint from you guys, but it seems the game has just opened up to me. I’m not convinced that I won’t be back here asking for help shortly, but for now...

Watching the mysterious woman melt away, screaming in horror, pleased me very much

Game 9: Uninvited - Introduction

Our haunted mansion offers world class diving and sunsets

Uninvited is the second game to be released on ICOM Simulations’ MacVenture engine (known as PCVenture when ported to the PC). It was originally released for Apple in 1986 before being ported to numerous platforms, including DOS in 1987. The first MacVenture game was the noir influenced Déjà Vu: A Nightmare Comes True!!, which was the fourth game I played for this blog. That game was a relatively enjoyable adventure game, but was marred by low quality graphics and sound, and an ambitious yet frustrating inventory system. Of particular note when discussing this series of games is the fact that they are the first examples of what would come to be known as point and click adventure games, removing the text parser from the experience (although Déjà Vu did require it in small doses) and allowing the player to control everything with the mouse. This would become the standard for adventure games in years to come.

The original PC box cover

Uninvited moves away from the world of crime and murder, and instead puts the player into a haunted house situation. It’s apparently the only of the four MacVenture games to take place in the present day. I have to admit that the horror theme is much more in line with my personal tastes (while they’re both classics, I’ll watch The Exorcist over The Godfather any day), so I’m looking forward to Uninvited more than I probably should when I consider the low rating I gave Déjà Vu. It may also assist that this time I’m going in having had previous experience with the engine, so I shouldn’t have to spend much time trying to figure out the mechanics of the game or fighting DOSBox, and can instead focus on the puzzles and the story as it unravels. The screenshots I’ve seen look suitably creepy, even in the dodgy CGA colour palette. Speaking of the low quality graphics, it’s worth clarifying that I’m going to be playing the 1987 DOS port and not the 1991 Windows 3.1 remake, as tempting as that is.

People who play in 16 colours are soft!

I’ve found the game, downloaded it and tested it (including the save and load features), and also got my hands on a PDF version of the manual and quick reference guide. A quick skim through both suggests there isn’t anything of note that has changed between games when it comes to the interface, which means that wearisome inventory system is still there. Here’s hoping there isn’t another panic inducing time limit to contend with this time, and perhaps less of a focus on pixel hunting, which is far more challenging when the CGA colour limitations make everything blur together in a swirl of pink and blue. Anyway, there’s no point sitting here worrying about what might or might not be. It’s time to see what Uninvited has to offer. If you don’t hear from me for more than a couple of days, then I guess I didn’t make it out of the house. Whatever you do, don’t come in after me!

Aaaaaaaaggghhhhhh.....(gurgle)

Game 8: Tass Times in Tonetown - Final Rating

Tass Times in Tonetown is for the most part an enjoyable adventure game, but I feel it’s my duty to highlight its flaws as much as it is to praise its highlights. My gut feeling is that it’s PISSED rating is going to be on the lower end of the spectrum, but we’ll see what happens…

Puzzles and Solvability
As I’ve already mentioned, the puzzles in Tass Times in Tonetown are actually pretty logical and enjoyable. When you enter an area and are killed because it's too dark to see, it’s logical to take a glo-burger with you next time. When the Daglets inform you that they originally wanted to play a concert at the tower but that their zagtone instruments disrupted the equipment there, it’s logical to take a zagtone with you when you try to free Gramps in the tower. As you can see, the items in the game are fairly ridiculous, but their use is in most cases obvious. It’s therefore unfortunate that the solvability of the game is made drastically more difficult by the many possible dead ends. It’s really very difficult to know when the game has become unfinishable, so I’m sure I’m not the first player to waste hours aimlessly looking for a solution that just isn’t there. For that reason I’ll have to give it a 4.

Having a glo-burger with you stops this from happening, but it wouldn't be the last time I'd see those teeth

Interface and Inventory

The game successfully mixes both an interactive fiction text parser and a graphical interface, allowing the player to utilise whichever one suits their purposes at the time. I personally found the graphical interface too unruly to use properly, but that had more to do with the way I was forced to use it (mapping joystick movements to unused keys) than any issue with the game itself. I found the text parser to be adequate, but faced the same issues that I always do with games based on this technology. Ask the wrong question and you’ll get the wrong answer, meaning you can find yourself rejecting an idea that was actually correct, just because you didn’t use the right language. That being said, the ability to use the graphical interface takes this problem away, as language doesn’t come into it. The limited inventory is annoying however, particularly in those early stages of the game where you don’t know what you need and when you’re going to need it. I carried around items for nearly the whole game that I didn’t need until the very end, meaning one of my eight inventory slots was taken up permanently. When you consider that the picks (Tonetown’s form of currency) and the clothes you’re wearing take up three slots, it doesn’t leave much room for anything else. It’s a generous 5 for this category.

Oh now you want the book! Thankfully it's not one of the items I purposely dropped this time.



Story and Setting

The storyline of Tass Times in Tonetown was initially quite intriguing. Gramps is missing and the evidence suggests that he’s used a strange device to transport himself to another time or dimension. Going in after him really does give the player a sense of excitement, with a strange new world to explore on arrival. As the game goes on however, the story becomes thinner and thinner, with very little explanation as to why things are the way they are and what the player’s motivations are for their current task. Once you save Gramps, he tells you he has an important task to complete and that the player is welcome to assist, but he never explains what that task is or how to go about it. If you then try to talk to him again, he basically dismisses you and just tells you we need to deal with Snarl. Its times like this that just a few more lines of text would give the player more awareness of what they’re trying to achieve and give some direction. The ending is also very sudden, with everything wrapped up in an unsatisfactory way, leaving numerous unanswered questions such as “why are Gramps and Spot staying in Tonetown?”, “if Snarl is the combination of a pig, a raccoon and a crocodile, how did the mutation occur in the first place and how did Gramps know that sending him through the hoop would separate him?”, and “why did Snarl take Gramps prisoner to begin with instead of just killing him?”. This interesting yet incomplete story gets a 4.

Everyone seems to understand that I'm going home and they're staying...except for me.

Sound and Graphics

Sound and music in the game is minimal, although there are a couple of dodgy tunes that pop up at certain points, such as in Fast Freddie’s. At least whoever created the music knew not to use high pitched notes the way so many other early DOS games seem to, so it’s not too grating on the senses. Sound effects are limited to the occasional gurgle to inform you that a creature is nearby and various blips and blops. As for graphics, well once again PC players got the raw end of the deal, with the CGA palette 1 blues and pinks ruling the screen. It’s not completely out of place in this game, as the psychedelic colours kind of suit the oddities of Tonetown, but there’s no doubt that Amiga and Apple players had a more attractive experience. Animation is used rarely and crudely when it is, but it did give a sense of life to Tonetown, so I’m glad it was there. The game looks and sounds a bit better than Déjà Vu which I gave 2, so a 3 seems fitting.

The game looks so much more tone on the Amiga!

Environment and Atmosphere

This is where Tass Times in Tonetown does make a stand. The world of Tonetown and its inhabitants is truly bizarre and the atmosphere is consistently strange and fascinating. There’s no way that you can predict what you’ll find on the next screen when the world is filled with unusual creatures, floating telephones, burgers that glow in the dark, office corridors that never end and talking journalist canines, not to mention there’s an eye and an ear guarding a gate in the woods. The fact that you die suddenly and horribly at regular intervals gives Tonetown a constant element of threat, which also adds to the atmosphere. It’s probably this intriguing element that drove me to keep playing the game, even when the story started to diminish and the puzzles became unsolvable, so I’ll give this category a 6.

Ok that's just weird!

Dialogue and Acting

The dialogue and description found is Tass Times in Tonetown is certainly colourful (much more colourful than the CGA limited graphics). The unique language that the locals use not only acts as a reminder that you’re a long way from home; it also plays a role in at least one puzzle. When I first tried to talk to Nuyu, he responded with “far too linear – too Jonboi Waltune!” After reading about Jonboi Waltune in the newspaper and how he was made an outcast after his refusal look stylish, I realised Nuyu didn’t want to talk to me because of my appearance. After mimicking their style his response was “you look tone!” and he then hired me on the spot. There’s plenty of humour thrown in and the game’s self-referential tendencies always raise a smile. For all these reasons I’m given the game a 6 for Dialogue and Acting.

Electrolic! Indeed!

47 it is for Tass Times in Tonetown which puts in above The Black Cauldron and Déjà Vu but below the likes of King's Quest and Below the Root. This seems entirely fitting to me, so I'm fairly satisfied with the way the PISSED rating system is working. I kind of wish the scores were more distributed, but I assume that will happen over time. It's time to move onto another ICOM game and I really hope Uninvited shows some improvement over Déjà Vu, which used the same "engine". I may not be invited, but I'm going nonetheless!

Game 8: Tass Times in Tonetown - Won!

Journal Entry 2: “I did it! Well, I should say “we” did it! After much detective work, Ennio and I rescued Gramps from an otherwise empty office block where Snarl had him locked up. The three of us then set about finding Snarl with the intention of putting an end to his villainous ways. It certainly wasn’t easy getting into his house, given the strange creatures that blocked the entrances, but we eventually found a way in and confronted him. Ennio cornered him while Gramps got the hoop working (I’m not sure why Snarl had one but I was sure glad to see it) and then I finished him off with some electrical creatures I’d found in the woods called Red Devils. We then pushed him through the hoop, sending him out of Tonetown and into my normal dimension. I shed a few tears and said goodbye to Gramps and Ennio before I also stepped through the hoop and went home, but I had to chuckle when I found a pig, a raccoon and a little crocodile sitting on the side of the road looking forlorn. Apparently Snarl was a combination of the three, which I guess explains why he was so damn ugly!”

Yep, Tass Times in Tonetown sure is a strange game. From start to finish not much of what goes on gets any real explanation and I found myself shaking my head at the sheer wackiness of it all quite often during the five and a half hours it took me to complete it. Before I talk about my more recent experiences with the game, I wanted to overturn a comment I made in my previous post. I was fairly certain at the time that the game required the player to pixel hunt in the graphic window instead of being able to purely rely on the text descriptions to figure out what items are relevant. I came to this conclusion prematurely, after struggling to find the first item I needed in Gramp’s cabin due to it not being mentioned anywhere in the text. After a couple of hours play without any other instances of this happening, I decided to play through that first scene again to see whether I just missed something.  As it turns out, I’d simply failed to notice the hint that was right in front of me all along, which is that Spot was “barking at the kitchen counter”. I hadn’t yet figured out the importance of paying attention to Spot / Ennio, and if I had of simply typed look at kitchen counter, I wouldn’t have had to click on every item in every room trying to find something of use. In summary, there is no pixel hunting required to complete Tass Times in Tonetown!

I can't really blame the game for my lack of observation skills can I!

So what did I think of the game? I’m afraid that’s not an easy question to answer, as it really is a game of negatives and positives. On the positive side, the game is quirkily charming, quite funny at times, and the mystery is generally solved using a logical approach, despite the craziness going on all around you. At the end of my last post, I was thinking that if I can make myself not look like a visitor to Tonetown, then Snarl would stop killing me due to his hatred of tourists, and I was completely right. Lots of times I found that my intuition of what to do was right, which is a good sign that the game’s puzzles are fairly logical. Strangely enough, I went to bed last night after getting a bit stuck, only to wake up in the middle of night knowing exactly how to proceed (I’m sure my wife loved me waking her up to tell her that I just needed to take a Blobpet with me from Snarl’s pet store to the woods where the pile of soil was too hard for me to dig through with my bare hands). Another positive is the useful interaction between Ennio and the character, warning him when he should be careful and hinting when he should take note of something. It’s certainly the first example of companions actually being useful, which is particularly refreshing after playing The Black Cauldron with its “well, they were in the book, so they have to be in the game” characters.

Hired for my good looks! Not surprising I guess (ahem)...

Unfortunately, the game does have its fair share of negatives, not least of all the inventory size limitation. Given there are quite a few items to be found in the game and the non-linear approach means you can pick up any of them at any time, limiting the inventory to eight items is rather irritating. As I was playing the game for the first time, I had no idea whether I would ever need to use an item more than once, but I was quickly forced to drop anything I’d already used to make room for ones I hadn’t. It turns out that in almost every case, the use-it-once-and-drop-it approach was correct, except when I found out at in the finale that the very first item I dropped (the book I found in Gramp’s lab in the first scene which hinted at where he’d disappeared to) was required a second time to finish the game. Items you’ve dropped are easily visible in the graphics window and also mentioned in the text description, but remembering where you dropped a particular item can be quite a strain on the brain. Limiting the inventory in this way really forces the player to either restart a couple of times, using the knowledge you’ve gained to only pick up the items you need early on before disposing of them, or to choose one location to dump all used items into in case you’re later required to go back and get one of them.

Oh yay, some mitts! I'll just leave my camera here on the dancefloor so I can carry them

Undoubtedly the biggest flaw of Tass Times in Tonetown is the dead ends that arise due to doing things in the wrong order. The game is actually really, really short (if I played through it now from start to finish, I reckon I could do it in around twenty minutes), but it took me five and a half hours to complete it because I got stuck in situations where , unbeknownst to me, I was never going to be able to finish it. At around the three hour mark, I’d mapped every screen, was pretty certain I’d collected every item, and had saved Gramps. The only thing left to do was to find Snarl and defeat him some way, and my only two avenues were a locked gate in the woods and a well near the town. Every time I entered the well, I was killed by “mad creatures” immediately, and I simply couldn’t find any way to get through the gate in the woods, despite taking out the guards. After trying every avenue I could think of, I restarted the game, and remembering that I had actually successfully entered the well earlier without being killed, decided to focus on getting through there prior to saving Gramps. This decision eventually lead to victory for me, as saving Gramps prior to entering the well, getting onto Snarl’s property, and unlocking the gate from the inside, results in an unfinishable game. Now that I have finished, I can see several other ways that the game could be made unfinishable, which I avoided through luck alone.

What he should have said is "Don't save me now you idiot! You haven't unlocked Snarl's gate from the inside!"

Taking the above pros and cons into consideration, I think the PISSED rating system is unlikely to be particularly generous when it comes to Tass Times in Tonetown. Strangely enough though, I still quite enjoyed the game, and would recommend it to anyone that finds pleasure in interactive fiction, more so than fans of Sierra or Lucasarts style adventure games. If the dead end I banged my head against futilely all morning hadn’t left such a bad taste in my mouth, I’d probably be pretty positive about the game overall. As it is, I can’t ignore it, and will have to judge the game accordingly, which I’ll do tomorrow.

It seems the game has ended?! That's my reward!?!?