ALICE BLUE is an experimental game with an unusual, custom interface.

Gameplay: The game is quite opaque. Descriptions are sparse and unenlightening; most refer to memories of the protagonist without much explanatory detail. It’s not clear how exactly to play the game. Highlighted keywords indicate important objects, and they can be treated as commands themselves. Beyond that, the game is difficult to navigate. Part of that is simply the confusing nature of the game itself, but the fact that unrecognized or invalid commands are simply ignored without any feedback adds to the problem. 2/10.

Mechanics: Although its walkthrough indicates that there are definite goals and puzzles in it, the game is too unclear and difficult to navigate for them to be approachable. There’s a general mechanic dealing with memories, but I was unable to accomplish much with it. 2/10.

Presentation: The system requirements are quite specific, and I was unable to find a machine capable of playing the game in its original format; instead, I used a Windows port kindly provided by a user on the int-fiction forum. While I normally don’t dock points for the difficulty of setting up the game, this particular situation is unusual enough that it at least deserves mentioning. The text of the game is vague to the point of meaninglessness, and it’s not polished; the first line of the game even contains two errors. Gameplay is frustratingly slow, with commands taking multiple seconds to run on my machine. 1/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You’re interested in what an IF engine written as a bash script looks like.

Score: 2