Stone Cell by Middle Edge - given with this issue

                  Reviewed by Nick Edmunds

In Stone Cell you play Logastra, a medieval peasant girl living in
a small village.  The introduction explains how other villagers
have complained about the style of games you play, and how your
appearance at church improperly attired, i.e. in your work
clothes, is the last straw for the populace, who decide that jail
is a fitting place for such a child.  You may be aware of the
concept of spare the rod and spoil the child, but one feels that
their response in this instance is a trifle extreme; still there's
nowt so strange as folk, particularly medieval ones.  Thus as the
game opens we find ourselves imprisoned in a cell made of stone.

For the first part of the game you basically just follow the
narrative and are pushed around by the plot while continually
hitting the Z (wait) key.  There was a point here when I began to
wonder where the interactive bit was going to join the fiction,
but it turned up eventually.

Once ensconced within the cell we are initially too tired to do
anything other than sleep.  Upon waking our first task, as you may
have already deduced, is to escape the aforementioned cell. Due to
the lack of light we are forced to explore the cell with our sense
of touch; a thorough search of which reveals it to have grown
during our repose.  While it may appear a bit of an odd decision
to map the cell as a 3 x 3 grid after describing just how tiny it
is, I presume this was intended as an illustration of how the cell
feels bigger in the dark and as such worked quite well.

After fumbling around in the dark with a few awkward command lines
a fellow prisoner in the cell next door gives you a hand out of
your cell.  Old man Pietro is obviously a past master at such
shenanigans and pulls the classic 'distract the jailer with a
sudden and inexplicable bout of illness' routine to great effect.
It's reassuring to see that the level of incompetence required to
achieve jailer status remains one of the great universal
constants, as too many industries these days have let their
standards slip and are no longer interested in upholding
tradition.  Once out of the cell the game becomes slightly more
orthodox with a constant threat of discovery as we explore the
rest of the castle.  This search culminates in a masterful con of
the confused leader of the fascist regime into granting our pardon
so that we can return home.

Written using Tads, Stone Cell is well coded with good use of
grammar and elaborate descriptions that err on the side of
overwritten.  While geographically quite small SC is
comprehensively detailed, with much extraneous scenery
implemented, which goes a long way toward successfully creating a
feeling of a world in which the game takes place.  Unfortunately
it would appear that more work went into the game descriptions
than into the storyline as I found much of the plot implausible
and a few of the puzzles a little tenuous to say the least.
Hindsight plays a large part in the puzzle solving process as many
of the problems weren't only poorly clued but involve the sort of
task which you have to get wrong before you even know that it's a
puzzle.  This made the skill level of the game quite uneven.
Fortunately for me a walkthrough was included, without which I'm
sure I would never have got to see the alternative endings.  In
fact I had managed to miss one of the endings (signified by an
onscreen indicator) almost as soon as I'd started, which didn't
exactly instil me with confidence.

SC is a reasonable game, competently written, that simply wasn't
quite my cup of tea as several design decisions of the game didn't
suit my style of play.  There's obviously a great deal of
potential here, but the game development has concentrated more on
prose than on plot and gameplay has suffered as a result.









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