Zozzled

The personality on this one smacks you right in the face from the first sentence on. It's a spicy little number about a Prohibition-era flapper trying to get a drink in a hotel where all the booze has mysteriously turned into water (and not in the usual way) just in time for a police raid. Naturally, both the cops and the crime boss are seriously upset at this development, but we soon discover what's going on.

Ghosts.

The game that follows concerns our efforts to deal with the minor spirit-soaked spirits before taking on the big boss prohibitionist ghost. The puzzles, for the most part, aren't going to blow your mind anytime soon, but the writing sparkles with panache and energy. We get a really good feel for our protagonist, and that contributes greatly to our immersion into the world she lives in. There's a high dependence on period slang, but I think context should be sufficient to suss out the meaning of any obscure turns of phrase.

This is, of course, a comedy. The crime boss has a speech impediment that forces him to always say the exact opposite of what he means ... he can only lie. (Apparently, he was once a doorman, and his partner then always told the truth....) The hotel's architect has left behind a 147-page typewritten rant (we only find page 1) about how the imbeciles surrounding him have sullied his vision by not building the hotel out of gingerbread as per his specs -- seriously, the invective in that note is in a class by itself. Combine with the personality mentioned earlier, and it's a cocktail with quite a punch.

As a breakfast ... I'm not sure I've ever come across anything that wasn't so obviously a Bloody Caesar. A bit of the "hair of the dog", in other words. Bottoms up!