You have been unaccountably knocked out by your employer and left in the wine cellar where you work--why? you may never know--and you have to get out. There's potential here--it's rare that you get a good creative way of getting through a locked door in IF these days--but the way you actually do get out is more strange than creative, frankly, and when you do, you're greeted by a highly weird development, presumably another tactic your nasty employer has devised to get rid of you. (The concept feels like an homage to pulp detective fiction, in which the villain feels compelled to devise ridiculously roundabout ways to get rid of the hero. Hitting him on the head with a rock never had the requisite aesthetic appeal, I guess.) As is not unusual, you do certain vital actions not because they make much sense but because you've got to if you want to move the game along--and with only two rooms, there isn't really anywhere else to go. So what if one bit is somewhat suicidal? If you're stuck in a wine cellar, you may as well look for ways to kill yourself, and one way is as good as another. Or so I rationalize on behalf of the author.

The design is clumsy at best. The game centers on a bit of machinery which, if I understand correctly, is a wine-press--but dang, that sure wasn't clear from the description, and I was unable even to picture the thing until I read the walkthrough and realized what the author wanted me to do. With hindsight, the puzzle does make _some_ sense, though then again I've never actually seen a wine-press and can't tell whether your actions are reasonable. (It doesn't seem like they could be--it seems like you get entirely too much time--but what do I know?) To use a certain tool, moreover, you have to do something that suggests either that you're a moron and are holding the thing by the wrong end or that the tool is lacking a handle--and if it's the latter, that's the sort of thing that EXAMINE [object] might want to tell us. The machinery is both mentioned in the room description and as an item apart from the room description, which made me want to "purloin" the thing (debugging commands are on) and throw it around just for fun. To operate the machinery, you have to realize a certain key fact which the game doesn't tell you, and which I guessed only because there really isn't much to do in the game. Worst of all is the way you get out, both for its lack of sense and for your inability to discover it unless you do something ENTIRELY unguessable.

There are other problems as well. One of the ways the author kills you--you stand on a chair and touch a wire and get electrocuted--shouldn't work, unless there's something the author isn't telling us about this "wooden" chair. (Moreover, it takes real persistence to die from the electric shock associated with common household outlets--I mean, you've got to clamp your hand on that thing and leave it there, man.) It isn't inherently bad to have a puzzle based on an old wives' tale--Infocom used the same one--but the way you do it here makes the whole thing a bit more absurd than it need be. The syntax is rather obscure at a key moment--at least, logical synonyms aren't included--and doing what you need to do with the wine-press is complicated by the inexplicable division of it into three components: a drum, a cover, and a hole in the drum, all of which are considered potential candidates if you try to interact with "drum".

The writing could stand some proofreading--one room has "relatively few noteworthy" and "an old heavy machinery"--but the prose isn't bad. It just doesn't convey the one important scene adequately, and in a game this small, that's something of a problem. The game actually tells you that you could climb onto the drum if it weren't so tall, but you can climb into it without help--and if you bring the chair in and stand on that, you can't get into the drum; "you'll have to get off the old wooden chair first." One suspects that the author is having fun with one at times like these. Glitches in the writing here and there aren't a huge issue, aside from aesthetics, but writing that actually misleads the player is a bad sign.

There isn't much to Cask, and what's there needs work. The author has an interesting idea with his wine-press, but, if I may say so, he needs a few more ideas to make this a viable game; in its current form, I give it a 2.