Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

It’s time to go back to the early 19th century for Eduard the Seminarist.

Since the Karlsbad decrees, guards patrol here from time to time, but tonight all seems calm.

There are some games for which a relatively minimal style of description works. This is not one of them. Aside from brief snippets of unexplained history like the one above, the room descriptions are like this

Hall
To the north is the front door.
To the west is the dormitory door.

which given all the sense of place might as well be part of a 21st century “My Dorm Room” game.

There’s a plot, but even discovering it in the first place requires an unclued action. It is possible to get through most of the game without doing this action.

The puzzles aren’t terrible on paper, but in practice they’re confusing, poorly implemented, and easy to botch up (making the game unwinnable; I had to restart three times). The puzzles also have no sense of history and could have easily been implemented in a “modern times” game.

Overall, this was a historical game with no point to it being historical. Either the setting or the actions needed to give a sense of who the main character was and why anyone would care about him.