IFReviewed by
David Whyld on 2006-10-30 05:18
Blurb: “Ben is just your average scientist...until something extraordinary happens that changes his life forever! These two episodes chronicle his adventure so far.”
A short game. Very short in fact. I think from start to finish it took me about ten minutes. While there are a few puzzles in the game, they're relatively easy so even someone like me, who has never been very good at puzzles, didn’t have any trouble with them.
The Wonders Of Science is the first part in a series of short games, and aside from a few rough edges it looks quite promising. The player is a scientist called Ben who needs to hand in a scientific article very shortly. Only he has a slight problem in that he’s spilt mustard over the article, thus obscuring all the relevant parts, lost the backup copy, and can’t remember what he wrote.
While amusing in places, the game had a definite rushed feel to it and little attention seems to have been paid to ensuring it is bug free. Of bugs, it has quite a few*. Saying that, none of the bugs are real cripplers in terms of finishing the game, and none are going to stop you dead in your tracks, but they're bugs all the same. Considering the shortness of the game, it wouldn’t have been a difficult task to have got rid of the majority of them. The worst offenders seemed to occur right at the end of the game, when there's an NPC who can’t be spoken to and an invisible cage, though there are frequent typos littered throughout the text.
* Although one that I came across when I first played the game seemed to have mysteriously fixed itself when I played through it game in order to write this review.
Unlike the writer’s previous two games, both of which were horrors, The Wonders Of Science has a few comical moments. It’s not a laugh out loud game, though I did grin a little at the ‘Mac’ and ‘BiPod’ digs and the robot in the hallway.
Overall this wasn’t a bad little game but it could have done with more attention being paid to fixing the bugs and checking the spelling.
5 out of 10
