Risorgimento Represso

From the Database of Home of the Underdogs

GAME DESIGNER:Michael Coyne
GAME DEVELOPER:Freeware
GAME PUBLISHER:Freeware
Copyright 2003, Michael Coyne

Rigorimento Represso is an excellent fantasy IF that won the well-deserved second place in the ninth Annual Interactive Fiction Competition. While the game is too long for a 2-hour time limit meant for competition games, the sheer quality of Rigorimento Represso will keep you glued to the screen long after 2 hours. The game’s premise is a cliche one, but it seges into a much more entertaining story the more you play. One day while being bored during a lecture, a mysterious portal appears out of nowhere. And of course, being the good adventurer that you are, you step into it without a second thought….

Rigorimento Represso shines with superb writing, lots and lots of customized responses to actions (thanks to a very thorough beta-testing process), and fun puzzles. J. Robinson Wheeler elaborates more on the puzzles in his IFComp review:

“It’s a great pleasure to play a game as well crafted and imaginative as this. The NPCs are a treat; they all have personality. The puzzles are fun. One of them is a bit of a clich?; you have a 3-pint container and a 5-pint container, and a tank that needs to be filled with guess-how-much water. However, what amused me about this was that there was nothing in the game that said how much water. It was just like, “Here’s the two containers. You know the drill.” I kind of enjoyed it, in a weird way. Fortunately, I solved the same puzzle recently in The Mulldoon Legacy, so I was all over it. My favorite bit of the game was when I deployed the ancient lost art of tyromancy, and I saw a series of visions that provided either clues to puzzles ahead or just intriguing snippets of roads not (yet) taken. (If the author muscles ahead on his plans to write a sequel, I strongly suggest making the game include all of the scenes here that we didn’t actually get to visit this time around, because that would be really cool.)” Two thumbs up, way up!