The language
It's tricky to get archaic English right because most people are not very familiar with it these days. I'm no expert, but a few errors were glaringly obvious to me:
* The inflections of "thou" are very similar to the inflections of "I": you can pretty much change the "m" to "th" to go from the first- to the second-person singular: hence "me", "my", "mine", "myself" in the first person are "thee", "thy", "thine" and "thyself" in the second person. In particular, note "thine". This means "yours",
not "your". So, for example, "thine name" is incorrect - this should be "thy name". Similarly, "thine self" is incorrect - this should be "thyself". However, "thine" can be used instead of "thy" before a vowel, so "thine eyes" is correct (as is "to thine own self be true"). Perhaps this usage led to the authors thinking that "thine" can always be used instead of "thy".
* "Regale" does not mean "recount", so you don't regale a tale to someone. It means to entertain (see
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/regale). Hence you regale someone
with a tale, you don't regale a tale to someone.
* "Vagabond" comes from the Latin for "wandering", so in "a wandering vagabond", the word "wandering" is redundant.
* There is no such word as "o'threw" - it should be "o'erthrew". ("O'" is a short form of "of", not "over".)
* I take it that the blue cup's misuse of archaic language ("Thou appeareth to be playingeth...") is deliberately incorrect.
* The changeling struggles with his thees and thous, calling them formal, but the formal form is actually "ye" (see
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ye).
* "Avast" is a nautical term, so, unless he used to be a sailor or pirate, why does the monk use it?
* "Shall" is occasionally used as if it were a formal form of "will" (eg, "We shall crush you"), but it is not. "We shall crush you" means "We are going to crush you"; to say "We are definitely going to crush you", you would need to say "We will crush you". See the usage notes at
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/shall - while the distinction isn't really made these days, it certainly would have been in the era in which the game appears to be set.
* The use of US English clashes a little - British spellings would have given a truly quaint, olde worlde feel.
* The contractions "'tis", "'twas" and "'twould" should have a capital "t" when used at the beginning of a sentence (compare "'Twas the night before Christmas...")
* "Loathe" is a verb meaning to detest. "Loath" (or "loth") is an adjective meaning "reluctant". Hence "The fox seems loathe..." should be "The fox seems loath..."
* "tidings will turn" - tidings are news; should this be "the tide will turn"?
* There is no such word as "antromorph" - shouldn't this be "anthropomorph" (= humanoid)?
* A common mistake when quoting poetry is to put a comma at the end of each line. Poetry should be punctuated in exactly the same way as the text would be if written as prose. Consider the following lines taken from the game and converted into prose: "Careful, he might be tempted to bite or put up a fight." Note that there is only one comma, and none after the words that come at the ends of the lines in the equivalent poetry. In poetical form (the slashes separating the lines are not needed when the lines are given one at a time) this becomes: "Careful, he might / Be tempted to bite / Or put up a fight." No extra commas should be added. See for example the famous "To be or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet for a good example of punctuation (or its absence) at the ends of lines of poetry.
* "Have need for" and "in search for" should be "have need of" and "in search of", respectively.
* "Fae" is fuel-air explosive (see
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fae) - should this be "fay" or "fey" (
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fay,
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fey)?* Does a harp have snares? A snare drum does, certainly, but aren't the strings of a harp just called strings? There is no mention of harps at
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/snare nor of snares at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harp* "Rise" is intransitive; "raise" is transitive. Hence "...would make Theylinn rise once more..." (not "raise").
On the plus side:
* Thumbs up for the correct use the archaism "an", meaning "if".
* Double thumbs up for the amusing motto on the shield in the smithery - a nice little joke for those who understand Latin.
Bugs and other errors (some or all of which have or might have already been reported)
* When you pick up the squirrel while it is sitting on the roof, you are told that it climbs down the
tree (which is one bug). It then does not move at all until you interact with it again, at which point it instantaneously moves from the roof to the ground.
* If you walk across the bridge in the righthand half of Thierna na Oge, the others follow you and hem you in, meaning that you can't move or do anything else. Presumably there is some sort of character collision detection in the program that gets stuck at this point.
* You can talk to the guard outside the castle while you are a rabbit, ask to see the princess and even tell him who you are, and he doesn't turn a hare... er, a hair. Maybe he saw you being transformed, however.
* It is a hare, isn't it, and not a rabbit? I don't remember which word the game uses.
* If you attempt to cross the bridge northwards whiel you are a hare, you are told that the fox runs off in search of less elusive prey. Two bugs here: no fox is present; and the game repeatedly displays the message, getting stuck in an infinite loop.
* "You feel uncomfortable crossing the river" - I am guessing that there is some scripting here that draws a straight line between your current and intended positions and tests to see whether it crosses water. The problem here is that this message is displayed even if you happen to clip a tiny bit of the river, which is silly as the hare is going to walk along the bank regardless. I think the test should be updated to test whether or not the start and end positions are on opposite banks, which would mean the hare would definitely be crossing the river.
* You need to hop around
inside the faery ring, not just around it (I hopped around the stones for ages before I realised this) - perhaps the game can make this clearer.
* Apparently the walls of the city are too smooth for footholds to allow you to climb them, but you are able to scramble down them easily enough when you use the plant to get in. Of course, this is essential for the game, but it's inconsistent.
* The inner wall of the castle is much higher than the outer wall... is the interior of the castle set into the ground?
* There are several places were the name of an object does not appear in messages when you look at the message - these include the following, some of which have already been mentioned: the statue on the stairs in the castle; the plant to the left of the gate in Thierna na Oge; the rope ladder in the cave.
* In Chapter 8, all the doors in the castle are locked but the leftmost. When you try the leftmost door, you walk towards it and the guards spot you when you are halfway down the corridor. Unless you tried opening the other doors by remote control, would the same not happen when you tried, say, the second leftmost door, which is way beyond halfway down the corridor? The character should really walk to each door that is tried, not just to the leftmost one. You'll still get caught, but hey, that's the way the game goes.
* If you play the flute again in the castle after the guards have left, you get disembodied comments from the guards and the game crashes as it attempts to move the non-existent guards out of the room: in Room 90 script (line 486) - Error: MoveCharacter: character not in current room
