(This memorable little wrinkle of course has the added benefit for Ms. The most obviously unique feature of the City is that there is no such thing as night - it's daylight all the time, apparently due to some sort of human tampering. Short's creation in which magic and high technology co-exist, and are (predictably enough) frequently at odds with one another. Indeed, it's the City that is the real main character of the game. While doing all this, you also get the opportunity to explore the City and learn something about its culture and history. You must sort out what is really going on, figure out who are the real good and bad guys, and finally choose a side to support. Your sightseeing there is quickly complicated by a mess of conspiracies and counter-conspiracies that you discover. The plot has you, a rather naive tourist, arriving in a large city for the first time. To be honest it's not my cup of tea - I prefer puzzles (like Metamorphoses), but I have no problems recommending this game to anyone.Įmily Short's longest and perhaps most ambitious game, City of Secrets wowed me completely for the first hour or two I spent with it. The way that the story unfolds is very well done, with different NPCs (and some books) filling in different parts of the canvas with their own style. You can chat to (and "up" to some extent) a large number of NPCs who are all intelligently programmed. It's not a puzzle-fest it's not supposed to be. She has also admirably succeeded in giving the different sectors of the City a unique feel. The city is represented as 20 or so rooms, but between the graphical map that you have available and the intuitive layout of the main thoroughfares travel is easy. The superb map design also contributes to this feeling. The City seems to be an actual place rather than merely the setting for a game. Such extras as your complementary personal shampoo from the hotel are fully implemented, which gives the world a solid feeling. There is an impressive amount of detail in the descriptions with nearly all first level objects implemented and many second and third level as well.
More than any other IF game I can think of, City Of Secrets offered me ideas that feel like they apply directly to my life - that's the mark not just of a great game, but of a great work of art. Queen Rine's Meditation Upon Passion now hangs on my office wall. A quote from the denouement now appears in my collection of randomly rotating email signatures. I think my favorite thing about City Of Secrets is that it gave me several pieces of writing to treasure, things that I wanted to enshrine and remember. Story-wise and by the creation of the setting, it is one of the best IF out there.
We’re just a tourist without a clue what’s going on, so large part of the game is just exploration and marvelling at all the wonders around us. Features a "novice" mode, but the standard mode is recommended for anyone but the absolute newcomer to IF. Even though most characters will respond to a wide variety of topics, it's still easy to run out of things to say. Uses the conversation system from Pytho's Mask: a combination of menus and ask/tell that's sensitive to context and lets you change topics arbitrarily. Good sense of choice: although there's basically only one ending, much of what happens along the way is variable. Excellent world-building, not just in that the environment is highly explorable and implemented in great detail, but in that the city has a distinct foreign-metropolis-through-tourist-eyes flavor, and a history which makes itself known in various and subtle ways.
In a city based on both high technology and magic, trains and robots and illusions, an innocent traveller gets swept into the center of a clandestine power-struggle which will forever change the city and how it is seen. Possibly Short's most polished work, and that's saying something.
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