Open Sorcery: Sea++

A wonderful text-based adventure game with a plethora of puzzles all set in Abigail's fascinating world of magic and computing. It's all wrapped up in the story of a fascinating protagonist that feels like a real person who has lived a very difficult and painful life. The writing and delivery of the material is excellent; there are moments of true sadness and joy mixed in with the magic and wonder as you piece together the protagonist's memories.

A poignant story of magic, beauty and suffering.

This game is a lot of fun. It's fairly linear but has room for backtracking, and places where you can't are generally well marked. There were a few puzzles that I had to go to guides for, but on the whole not that many, and a big part of the fun is that the game doesn't hold your hand in things and instead encourages you to discover the rules for yourself. The sound design and backgrounds are great, and I didn't see any typos in the content which is always a plus for a game focused on text-based story-telling. It isn't exactly like the first game, but similar enough that if you enjoyed BEL/S you'll like this.

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PRETTY BAD. The first open sorcery game at least had a fun and enjoyable gameplay loop. This one just feels like pure leftist-feminist propaganda. Not fun to play at all. Just lots and lots of traumatic stories combined with a hellishly (heh) difficult system.

I really don't have the words to explain clearly how much I like this one, but Sea++ is better than the original open sorcery, which was a very good storytelling game.

Best. Game. Ever. The immersion inside this world is nothing short of profound. The prose is only beaten by the innovation of the most colourful and nuanced piece of hyperfiction I've ever played. It is beautiful, haunting, and so organic, that the interactions between yourself and the warped populous of merged spirit/digital/imagined entities feels personal and so powerful. I'm 7 hours into the game, and hope to God that I'm playing slowly as I do not want to surface from this world, in spite of its treacherous depths and thin-skinned fragility of a character. This fragility is really well-balanced with emergent magic that you learn, experiment, use frivolously and lose, but always learn, and add to a rich tapestry of the narrative. To aid exploration in the game I've been drawing a map on my tablet, that has spilled so far into the edges with details that it's become non-euclidean, which unintentionally feels at home within the lore of Open Sorcery.

Fantastic writing. All the good of an IF game without the frustrations of overly obscure solutions.

The writing, worldbuilding, and storylines are amazing, as per Open Sorcery. Every zone provides a new theme, challenges, and easter eggs and the world connects back on itself in a very interesting ways. The gameplay is wildly different from Open Sorcery but if your enjoyment came from the world I can thoroughly recommend this game. It's a classical text-based adventure game and one of my favourites at that. The puzzles are challenging in places and the game doesn't always tell you where to go or what to do next. You gain access to a very useful "hint" spell that helps you progress the main story, but its usefulness is hindered in some of the more frustrating puzzles/areas. I highly recommend having a pen and paper next to you to draw maps and write down key details. Overall, this is a great game. I enjoyed my time with it very much.

Very interesting text adventure that doesn't even feel like a game, more like an excursion into the author's mind. It's original, unconventional and clever. I have to say I really enjoyed it. At first, I thought that the first underwater area would be pretty much it but the game has so much content, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. There are several puzzles, riddles, word searches and everything seems to have more than one solution. And your choice of the solution does have some consequences. I never played the first game but now I feel I really should at some point. The music is great and perfectly matched to respective areas. It's relaxing, smooth, does not disturb the reader, just perfect. I especially liked the electric guitar one in Hell location. Top notch. Now for the negatives. At some point I have encountered a character stuck in some cave. The game told me that if I want to save them, I should be properly prepared - I basically had only one chance from what I understood. So I went on with my business, gathered resources and spells and at one point, I felt ready. I went back to the cave only to find the character is no longer there... so that sucked. I probably missed a whole lot of content so thanks for that useless warning, game. I also wouldn't mind having a map of some sort. Even though the locations are not that big, they are not small either. And there is one location where instead of the regular north/south/west/east you could also go up and down and the paths are mostly blocked, it's a mess and I got lost there several times. I don't know if it's because of my original expectations of something short but the game goes on for way too long. It gets really repetitive near the end and starts to feel more like a chore. And at one point, I just got stuck and had to use a guide only to find out that I missed an entire location. I don't know if its existence was hinted somewhere and I was too tired reading all the text but it was not (and still isn't) clear to me how I was supposed to discover it. Maybe some less subtle hint would help. At the end, it was very obvious that I was missing several things, I could not complete one of the final "rooms" because I did not have enough dreams and I had no idea where to get them. It was optional of course, you don't need to complete everything to finish the game, but it really felt like I was being punished for my choices and apparently a lack of exploration (even though I though I was very thorough). The ending left a bittersweet taste because of this. Overall, it was a great adventure regardless. And even though I don't usually play text adventures at all, I have to say that this one was something else entirely.