Temperamentum

This is a pretty simple game with bare-bones implementation. Having read an article about the ancient belief in bodily humours as the cause of illness, we now go through a sequence of dreams based around each humour. There's more to the story, though: apparently we're also dealing with certain issues in our waking life, and these dreams are a means of coming to terms with them.

So far so good. The puzzles are of the basic, old-school variety: get X, use X. But perhaps the implementation is a little too narrow: I don't know if it's been fixed since the beginning of the comp, but I was annoyed to discover that communication in the game starts with very non-standard "say hi to X" instead of the much more standard "talk to X". (Even if your game uses the "ask/tell" standard instead, "talk to" should at least give you an idea of how communication works.) Also, there was this one moment where I had to use "get all" to figure out what the "wooden instrument" in the description was, since the game didn't recognise "instrument" as a noun.

I did think the progression of the story was nice. We start the game knowing only that we're troubled by a nightmare, and the real thing that's troubling us emerges only gradually with the conclusion of each dream. There is one point which normally would annoy me: faced with a black box, we're told we (the character in the game) know what it is, though we (the player) have not been told. In this case, I think it worked, because by this time we'd seen enough to know that one more dream would make the characteristics of the box plain and clear to us; and also because the main character knows things that the player doesn't, and can make guesses based on this knowledge that the player can't. There'd be no mystery and no story progression otherwise, and this sort of thing, taken in very small doses, can add a certain piquancy to your dish.

Speaking of dishes, I'd guess that this, as breakfast, might be cereal (Cheerios, probably) with milk and instant coffee, taken at five in the morning while we're still half asleep. It does the job. There's a certain late-night melancholy about it, but we've got to get up and get our day started.