As the title character, you are sent off to investigate, by means of your psychic powers, two separate mysteries, which before long merge into one, naturally. And investigate you do; your actions are almost entirely wandering around and learning things, rather than solving puzzles. With the help of a well-implemented device for tracking your investigation--a notebook in which you record people or locations that you should visit, and which you can visit by means of TRAVEL TO [place]--you are saved from having to think all that much, even; a few commands and a minimum of thought will carry you through most of the story. Moreover, the story is rather intriguing in its way, if a bit conventional--ruthless scientists overreaching themselves and such--and the surprising or suspenseful moments are, more often than not, exactly that.
As noted, though, the strength of the story can only partly counteract the weaknesses of the implementation. For one thing, the prose swings wildly back and forth between present and past tense, and between third person and second person; it seems likely that the writer wrote the story in third person, past tense, and the programmer didn't bother to adapt things much. Moreover, the relationship between what happens in the long text chunks and the actual game is often tenuous, as in the following...
during all of this Madame L'Estrange has been taking occasional notes on her pad. Then Mr Jones stood up and thanked Madame L'Estrange in advance before heading back out into the wet Darlinghurst streets. >look Madame L'Estrange's Living Room Mr Jones is sitting in a comfy chairObviously, grammar problems abound; though the prose isn't awful, it needs to be proofread in the worst way. (Actually, perhaps that already happened.) One of the authors brags that he has "never willingly played a text adventure," which seems an odd claim to fame; it does, however, explain some of the problems with how this game is put together. In one location, you carry on a conversation with someone who, the game repeatedly tells you, is on the phone with someone; a randomized message outputs the "talking on the phone" response fairly often, whether it makes sense or not. At another point, though you're told that there are rooms to the east and north, and going in those directions gives you descriptions of those rooms, you never actually move. Several locations are crammed full of scenery that is not only irrelevant, but unrecognized by the game. And there are numerous fatal bugs--SAVE, for example, almost inevitably crashes the game from about the halfway point on.
Whoever did the writing here did a LOT of it; there are several situations where many full screens of text go by between inputs. Often, those scenes include fairly complicated dialogue by your character, handy in a way--since this game certainly isn't up to much in the way of parsing input--but also a bit destructive of the interactive element. Most of the characters have a two- or three-screen spiel to tell you, and once you've found that, you're generally safe moving on to the next character; the authors did not conceal the relevant information under a variety of topics. That speeds things along, I guess, though it does make the whole thing feel mechanical. Often, you can "tune in" to the spirit world to communicate with departed souls, a technique that provides an interesting sidelight but also some rough spots in the writing, as in this encounter with a fellow who'd passed on:
"I then realised that it was myy body down there and I'd just died, but, funny enough, I didn't seem to care. Then I found I could just fly about the place and I tried that for a bit. Then finally the police came and they looked around and then carted my body away. I thought I should see where they were taking it, just in case it was important, so I followed them and here I am. But I don't think I'll stick around much longer- there must be plenty of much better places I can go now I'm dead, though it's funny saying that."If that's all the dead have to say, those of us who don't contact them aren't missing much. The story is also cluttered somewhat by irrelevant details and locations or leads that don't offer anything, certainly welcome in the realism department--but with the amount of text this game has, more of it for no reason is not a real treat. And, naturally, there is very little development of your own character; she has a mind of her own, in that she carries on conversations without your help, but not much of it actually says anything about her. In fact, none of the characters in the game feels particularly real, oddly considering how much space there is for them to develop, and how freely the author gives several screens of text over to the characters to let them say whatever they want. There is so much text, in fact, that it's easy to miss the odd funny moment, such as, after you've been wandering around in a drainpipe: "If only the sodden and bedraggled look was in this year!" This all leads to an exceedingly strange endgame, very time-sensitive and hard to picture in what it does and doesn't allow you to do. However, it does add another puzzle (making, hmmm, 2 or so for the game), and it does manage to be somewhat suspenseful.
Madame L'Estrange is not a particularly successful effort, but its enjoyability depends on the standards of the player; for those who regard a story as an excuse to string puzzles together, this will be a waste of time, but those who appreciate a reasonably well-crafted story and don't mind minimal interactivity might find it reasonably diverting. If anything, this illustrates the difficulties inherent in detective-story IF--of which Infocom's are still the best examples--and in collaborative efforts; though I gave this a 6 on the competition scale, it could have been far better with more attention to implementation.