Ananachronist

Joseph Strom (2008)


Ananachronist is a puzzle game that's poorly coded, with no real story and uneventful game play. The goals aren't clear, you feel abandoned by the game, and it's impossible to get through. I had to resort to using the walkthrough.

You start out the game as an ananachronist, some sort of time custodian sent in to clean up the mess of wizard gone mad. There are three time zones to travel through, but it begins to unravel pretty quickly, not giving the player any direction to go in. Apparently each time zone can affect the other, but when you do something in one time zone there is no indication that you've done the right thing. Some sort of note to the player or even scoring points would help here, but you get nothing.

The game is also littered with grammar mistakes and spelling errors, showing that the overall product wasn't beta tested. Some of the problems that the game has could have been fleshed out in beta, and the overall product suffers. It could have really used a hint system too, that broke down each puzzle into its individual pieces.

There is little here to redeem it. There's a lot of bad code, impossible puzzles, with very little story. There are no interesting characters, and the settings aren't memorable. With more effort it could be improved, but you'd still be left with a puzzle-fest that doesn't amount to much. I'd give this one a pass.