Sunset over Savannah (Part of SynTax library disk 1227 PC) Reviewed on a P200MMX by Nick Edmunds In Sunset you play the role of someone approaching the end of their vacation. Someone who has suddenly been faced with the realisation of just how much they hate their job and has no desire to go back to it. (I hate it when art mimics life with such cruel accuracy.) Firstly, I didn't finish this game. It's quite small, having only 30 locations, and has a fairly straight forward plot and relatively simple puzzles. So why didn't I finish it? Because it drove me completely bonkers barmy mate that's bloody well why. Apparently Sunset over Savannah is the winner of the 1997 XYZZY award for best writing. Although there may possibly have been some mistake in passing over Savannah for the most writing award. For there is indeed much writing. Bloody loads of it. Writing here, writing there, writing all over the shop. More descriptions than you could wave a proverbial at and all this writing serves to do is to conceal any pertinent information that is there. While in a few instances even basic information, e.g. directions, has been omitted in favour of rambling descriptions of scenery. Alright, maybe it's me. Perhaps I was a just a little bit bonkers barmy to start with, after all I do have the attention span of a fickle goldfish. The descriptions are all very well written and the vividness does help create an impression of 'being there'. However I feel a bit more attention could have been given to playability, readability, and possibly other things ending in 'ility', rather than being solely concerned with cramming the most words possible into a description. Oh there's some nice touches, don't get me wrong, but they're mostly lost amongst all this gratuitous wordage. The most noticeable nice touch was the scoring system where you have a sort of mood rating type thing. It didn't seem to work very well as it didn't provide any sort of indicator to anything I could see (although it was marginally amusing at times), but it was different. What I really didn't like was having to put the crab in the boiler to get it out of the conch shell. I mean I can see the logic behind it and everything, that's what some people do to crabs, but I'd rather not do it myself. In fact I wouldn't do it myself so don't make me, man. Don't fence me in, daddio. Thus to surmise this game I would have to say that it is very well written from a literary view point, but quite textually verbose. Therefore I would not recommend it to anyone who dislikes massive wads of wordage or who likes their information in an uncomplicated fashion. It's also unsuitable for those with views against virtual cruelty to textual representations of little animals. @~See also Nick's letter on the subject of verbosity ... Sue - o -