Ninja's Fate

An homage to the late Paul Panks, this game is set in a museum dedicated to him and his works.

I have seen a few of Mr Panks' works, though apparently not the greater body of it as shown here. What I've seen was not very good, and I am given to understand that the rest was not much better. They were, at least, unique.

This game doesn't quite reach Mr Panks' uniqueness (uniquity?) which is probably a good thing. There is a maze of rooms, randomly generated, containing some of the more questionable elements of a Panks game -- and by "questionable", I mean in terms of design. Thankfully, this maze is apparently completely unnecessary to the story. Unfortunately, it is still there, taunting us with its questionable-in-terms-of-design presence.

The rest of the game felt a little sparse. There are hallways of exhibits, but we don't gather much from them. A pity; some discussion of the works in question would have gone far towards convincing me that this was a museum as opposed to some sort of catalog-index. A number of other design decisions, such as the dragon and the mysteriously doubled room, probably make more sense to someone who has followed the career of Mr Panks a good deal more closely than I did, but go unexplained in-game.

I think that the ending could have been more carefully thought out. The significance of the Ninja, as a part of Mr Panks' oeuvre, could have been better explained, and perhaps a little more development could have been done on the protagonist's part in the story, aside from the nominal retrieval quest.

Leftover Japanese rolled omelet, no coffee.