Good timing! I just played Anchorhead for the first time - completed
it yesterday! Lots of people have written reviews already, but I'd
like to comment. I'll try to keep it brief:
Wow, this game has depth! At the beginning of the game I was thinking
"hmm... lots of liquids and containers - there must be some puzzles
with that." But no, this is just a richly implemented world. I'm a
sort of halfway-Lovecraft fan and I recognized a lot of references,
but I'm never quite comfortable with the gore and the violence. This
is a game that makes you feel _bad_ sometimes! I think it's
appropriate to the genre, but I have three little girls of my own and
that made the game all the more disturbing. I hope you'll take that as
a compliment.
Anchorhead was really satisfying to play, and I never got painfully
stuck until the last section. The writing is incredible and for the
most part it handles the subject with maturity - more maturity,
perhaps, than Howard Philip himself would have. The story has great
direction and pacing.
I really liked the characters, especially the bum. However, towards
the end, some of the more involved interactions seemed strained.
Spoilers....
I had so much sympathy for the monster that I had to resort to hints
to figure out how to deal with him. Maybe it was me - there were
enough hints in the story, but I just couldn't think of him as an
enemy. Especially after the shopkeeper's comment "It's not his fault."
The second obstacle to guessing the solution was that I thought he was
too powerful to confront directly. After the fact, however, the
correct solution seemed merciful.
Michael's dialogue at the end sounded awkward to me. Everything was so
vivid and original up to that point that he seemed to turn into a
comic book villain during the last couple encounters. It was not how I
imagined a four-hundred-year-old small-town maniac would talk.
While we're on spoilers, I want to mention a couple bugs and confusing
sections. The box of newspaper clippings was implemented enough that I
thought there must be a puzzle built around carrying the clippings
around outdoors in the wind. But it was not implemented quite enough
to prevent some weird bugs. Even after the clippings are gone, it
still appears in room descriptions as a "box of newspaper clippings,"
and I believe if you drop the clippings on the floor on purpose, you
can't put them back in.
The other difficult section, and I think others might have commented
on this, is the church stairwell. The first time all my stuff fell
down the stairwell, I restored the game and put it down in the church
basement. Argh! Next, I walked around to the sewer and left my lantern
down there so I'd have a light source, thinking that the lantern would
break if I dropped it and not realizing I could just blow it out to
put it in my pocket. When I jumped onto the stairs, I was given a list
of things that fell into the stairwell, including the lantern! I
failed to guess that the "stairwell" or "stairway" or "stairs" could
only be referred to as the "shaft," so I thought dropping things into
it was not an implemented solution and you were supposed to leave your
trenchcoat behind. So I went down the rope in the dark wearing the
robe. I tried to jump off the rope but it wouldn't let me do it in the
dark. I tried "let go of rope" and got the response "dropped." but I
did not fall into the sewer!
In hindsight, I think the church scene is wonderfully elegant, but I
wish I'd had more clues that I didn't need to work so hard.
I hope I'm not completely duplicating other bug reports, and I'm sure
Anchorhead SE will not have any bugs in common, but just in case, I'm
reporting here what I discovered.