The Quiet Mountain

The plot of this is a bit of paranormal thriller, as a parent searches through a near-abandoned town to find his missing daughter.

The structure is that of an adventure puzzle; you go around exploring and looking for clues. Some sudden deaths funnel you back into where you are supposed to be, so the main path is not hard to find. Oddly, some death-ending paths do not trigger The End, but let you return to a previous spot as if nothing ever happened. Some choices that lead to reading material do this to, and you are returned to a former spot as if you had never read anything. It's as if those choices are for the reader alone, and not the character. It's odd.

There are three main puzzles at the cannery, bus station, and mountain path.

The first is a bit clunky as rooms are not labeled - you just go to the previous room or page and that doesn't help keep track of things. You also can't go back and explore more if you fail to obtain all the needed items before starting the puzzle.

The second is clever, but meaningless; even if you manage to obtain the ticket, you don't need it. [I think, unless it changes some hidden variable.]

The third is a pretty good maze puzzle.

The ending was disappointing the first time I played through, although it was descriptive and inventive. It didn't resolve things, so felt like a prequel. It seems to have been replaced with a shorter, but more plot satisfying, end. [Unless there are multiple endings and I managed to hit a different variable.]

The storygame is written in third person, which causes some distance between reader and character. Unfortunately, the tenses switch between past and present frequently, often within the same page.

If a few refinements were made to navigation/inventory and the desolate town expanded a little for flavor and less death-immediate exploration, it would be a nice, creepy puzzle game.

I'll try to review this without spoilers, there shouldn't be anything given away in this review. I like this as a sampler of a bigger game, but there are some glaring issues that you might want to fix RIGHT away. Maybe consider re-uploading this before people get too invested. The fish puzzle, please, make it easy to go back and get the pieces of the puzzle, because once you begin inspecting the conveyor belt, it is too late to go back and get those pieces, and then you have to restart the whole game. That's gonna make people give up far too easily, especially with such a weird concept for the beginning puzzle.

Once I got past that, the game got more on track with the theme of finding missing persons. However, I found something bizarre. There's framework for a puzzle at the bus station, but then there just... isn't one. You even have an item there that makes me think perhaps you’ve hidden something. I played through about three times trying to find it, and couldn’t. You need a puzzle here. Rule of threes.

The last puzzle is cool, not particularly difficult, but I liked it and went "ahhhhh" as I made the right choices. But then, what was that ending? Cmon, you gotta give me a little more than that, it was completely unsatisfying after all that kickass buildup. What I liked, I really liked but there's just so much that isn't executed on that I can't really rate it all that high. 4/8, but if you fix that scripting error I’m rating it a 5.

The writing is not bad, but the broken links bad mechanics and stupid first level puzzle that has nothing to do with the story makes it unplayable.