5 Minutes to Burn Something! Review
Author - Alex Butterfield
Once again, the annual IF Competition has bestowed itself upon us! This time, I start my playlist with a short Z-machine puzzler called 5 Minutes to Burn Something! This game starts out as a desperate young woman attempts to burn down her apartment by framing the incident on an accident, just to get her insurance cash. Apparently, she is running broke and is desperate to get some money to pay her outstanding bills.
One note to players is that 5 Minutes is a straight-forward puzzlefest, so we get no other story than the introduction. The puzzles are not exactly what I would call interesting or unique, but they suffice to keep the game going; the main task being having to build a fire from items in the house.
The game isn't joking to about needing to create a fire in 5 minutes (which is 300 moves.) As the puzzles are not hinted too well, expect to continuously save and restore to progress.
The hint system is particularly well designed, being able to cater to the current game puzzle by providing up to 10 hints per puzzle to players. It certainly helped me out when I had trouble locating the well-hidden items in the game (well, some of the items are hidden in unobvious places, which is a little unfair).
One thing I'm unhappy about is that players will encounter some guess-the-noun/verb problems towards the end, as many of the obvious words are unimplemented. I had to follow the walkthough exactly to reach to the end, and even the hints had failed to help me progress.
But even with the problems, 5 Minutes plays well enough as a quick puzzler. Not exactly a good game, but not a bad one either.
Verdict: 5/10
